Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

Description

In Teaching a Stone to Talk, Annie Dillard fixes her entrancing gaze and powerful sense of wonder on the natural world. Whether watching a sublime lunar eclipse or locking eyes with a wild weasel, Dillard captures the grand and miniature miracles of our universe. Annie Dillard is one of the most respected and influential figures in contemporary non-fiction and winner of the Pulitzer Prize. With Teaching a Stone to Talk, she illuminates the world around us with a new and glowing light.

Annie Dillard was born in 1945 in Pennsylvania. She is a much-celebrated poet, novelist and essayist and author of thirteen books, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. She is a member of the Academy of Arts and Letters and has received fellowship grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She was awarded the 2014 National Humanities Medal for her work deepening the understanding of the human experience. www.anniedillard.com

Dillard opens our eyes to the world and to new ways of articulating what we see -- GEOFF DYER Annie Dillard is one of those people who seem to be more fully alive than most of us, more nearly wide-awake than human beings generally get to be * * New York Times * * Among the greatest nature writers who have ever lived . . . Keen, urgent and impassioned, her subject is life itself, in all its teeming and marvellous forms -- OLIVIA LAING It was Annie Dillard who got me, before it was too late, to pay attention to where I was before I lost it -- RICHARD HOLLOWAY Annie Dillard's words are the outpouring of a brilliant mind tempered by a pleading heart. Her distinctive voice and incandescent imagery lifts us to heights few writers can ever hope to aspire to -- JOHN LISTER-KAYE Superb . . . Annie Dillard silver-streaks out of the blue and archingly transcends all other writers of our day in all the simple, intimate, and beautiful ways of the natural master -- BUCKMINSTER FULLER Dillard's style is spirited and gale-force. She raps out her opinions; lyrical, gleeful, cymbal-clashing, peppery. The best thing is her glee, a pied-piperish glee at being in the world, which she evokes better than anyone else -- ROBERT MACFARLANE Annie Dillard's books are like comets, like celestial events that remind us that the reality we inhabit is itself a celestial event -- MARILYNNE ROBINSON Annie Dillard's wise and funny essays remind us of what a profound blessing life can be if we do but one thing: Pay attention -- GARY TRUDEAU In essay after essay, Annie Dillard demonstrates the mystical art of using exactitude, condensation, and clarity to intimate turbulence, rapture, and plenty. . . The landscape of nonfiction and American letters looks barren without her radiance -- MAGGIE NELSON