the abundance narrative essays old and new

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The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New Paperback – Feb. 14 2017

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In recognition of her long and lauded career as a master essayist, a landmark collection including her most beloved pieces and some rarely seen work, rigorously curated by the Pulitzer-Prize winning author herself

“A writer who never seems tired, who has never plodded her way through a page or sentence, Dillard can only be enjoyed by a wide-awake reader,” warns Geoff Dyer in his introduction to this stellar collection. Carefully culled from her past work, The Abundance is quintessential Annie Dillard, delivered in her fierce and undeniably singular voice, filled with fascinating detail and metaphysical fact. The pieces within will exhilarate both admiring fans and a new generation of readers, having been “re-framed and re-hung,” with fresh editing and reordering by the author, to situate these now seminal works within her larger canon.

The Abundance reminds us that Dillard’s brand of “novelized nonfiction” pioneered the form long before it came to be widely appreciated. Intense, vivid, and fearless, her work endows the true and seemingly ordinary aspects of life—a commuter chases snowball-throwing children through neighborhood streets, a teenager memorizes Rimbaud’s poetry—with beauty and irony, inviting readers onto sweeping landscapes, to join her in exploring the complexities of time and death, with a sense of humor: on one page, an eagle falls from the sky with a weasel attached to its throat; on another, a man walks into a bar.

Including such classic essays as "Total Eclipse," "A Writer in the World" and "On Foot in Virginia's Roanoke Valley," The Abundance exquisitely showcases Annie Dillard’s enigmatic, enduring genius, as Dillard herself wishes it to be marked.

• Print length 304 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Ecco
• Publication date Feb. 14 2017
• Dimensions 2.29 x 13.97 x 18.29 cm
• ISBN-10 0062432966
• ISBN-13 978-0062432964
• See all details

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From the back cover.

A landmark collection of prose from pulitzer prize winner annie dillard, including her most beloved pieces and some rarely seen work

The Abundance includes the best of Annie Dillard’s essays, delivered in her fierce and muscular prose. Intense, vivid, and fearless, her work endows the true and seemingly ordinary aspects of life with beauty and irony. These essays invite readers into sweeping landscapes, to join her in exploring the complexities of time and death, often with wry humor. On one page, an eagle falls from the sky with a weasel attached to its throat; on another, a man walks into a bar.

Marking the vigor of this powerful writer, The Abundance highlights Annie Dillard’s elegance of mind.

About the Author

Annie Dillard is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of  Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, An American Childhood, The Writing Life, The Living  and  The Maytrees . 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.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Ecco; Reprint edition (Feb. 14 2017)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 304 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0062432966
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0062432964
• Item weight ‏ : ‎ 272 g
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 2.29 x 13.97 x 18.29 cm
• #305 in Nature & Ecology Essays (Books)
• #308 in Nature Writing & Essays
• #339 in U.S. Fiction Anthologies

About the author

Annie dillard.

Annie Dillard is the author of ten books, including the Pulitzer Prize-winner Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, as well as An American Childhood, The Living, and Mornings Like This. 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. Born in 1945 in Pittsburgh, Dillard attended Hollins College in Virginia. After living for five years in the Pacific Northwest, she returned to the East Coast, where she lives with her family.

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The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New

A landmark collection of prose from pulitzer prize winner annie dillard, including her most beloved pieces and some rarely seen work The Abundance includes the best of Annie Dillard’s essays, delivered in her fierce and muscular prose. Intense, vivid, and fearless, her work endows the true and seemingly ordinary aspects of life with beauty and irony. These essays invite readers into sweeping landscapes, to join her in exploring the complexities of time and death, often with wry humor. On one page, an eagle falls from the sky with a weasel attached to its throat; on another, a man walks into a bar. Marking the vigor of this powerful writer, The Abundance highlights Annie Dillard’s elegance of mind.

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The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New Paperback – 14 Feb. 2017

In recognition of her long and lauded career as a master essayist, a landmark collection including her most beloved pieces and some rarely seen work, rigorously curated by the Pulitzer-Prize winning author herself

"A writer who never seems tired, who has never plodded her way through a page or sentence, Dillard can only be enjoyed by a wide-awake reader," warns Geoff Dyer in his introduction to this stellar collection. Carefully culled from her past work, The Abundance is quintessential Annie Dillard, delivered in her fierce and undeniably singular voice, filled with fascinating detail and metaphysical fact. The pieces within will exhilarate both admiring fans and a new generation of readers, having been "re-framed and re-hung," with fresh editing and reordering by the author, to situate these now seminal works within her larger canon.

The Abundance reminds us that Dillard's brand of "novelized nonfiction" pioneered the form long before it came to be widely appreciated. Intense, vivid, and fearless, her work endows the true and seemingly ordinary aspects of life--a commuter chases snowball-throwing children through neighborhood streets, a teenager memorizes Rimbaud's poetry--with beauty and irony, inviting readers onto sweeping landscapes, to join her in exploring the complexities of time and death, with a sense of humor: on one page, an eagle falls from the sky with a weasel attached to its throat; on another, a man walks into a bar.

Including such classic essays as "Total Eclipse," "A Writer in the World" and "On Foot in Virginia's Roanoke Valley," The Abundance exquisitely showcases Annie Dillard's enigmatic, enduring genius, as Dillard herself wishes it to be marked.

• Print length 304 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Ecco Press
• Publication date 14 Feb. 2017
• Dimensions 2.29 x 13.97 x 18.29 cm
• ISBN-10 0062432966
• ISBN-13 978-0062432964
• See all details

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

Product description

From the back cover.

A landmark collection of prose from pulitzer prize winner annie dillard, including her most beloved pieces and some rarely seen work

The Abundance includes the best of Annie Dillard's essays, delivered in her fierce and muscular prose. Intense, vivid, and fearless, her work endows the true and seemingly ordinary aspects of life with beauty and irony. These essays invite readers into sweeping landscapes, to join her in exploring the complexities of time and death, often with wry humor. On one page, an eagle falls from the sky with a weasel attached to its throat; on another, a man walks into a bar.

Marking the vigor of this powerful writer, The Abundance highlights Annie Dillard's elegance of mind.

About the Author

Annie Dillard is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, An American Childhood, The Writing Life, The Living and The Maytrees . 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.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Ecco Press; Reprint edition (14 Feb. 2017)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 304 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0062432966
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0062432964
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 2.29 x 13.97 x 18.29 cm
• 3,993 in American Poetry (Books)
• 12,703 in Essays, Journals & Letters
• 13,817 in Travel Writing (Books)

About the author

Annie dillard.

Annie Dillard is the author of ten books, including the Pulitzer Prize-winner Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, as well as An American Childhood, The Living, and Mornings Like This. 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. Born in 1945 in Pittsburgh, Dillard attended Hollins College in Virginia. After living for five years in the Pacific Northwest, she returned to the East Coast, where she lives with her family.

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StarTribune

Review: 'the abundance: narrative essays old and new' by annie dillard.

Reading "The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New," a heady selection of Annie Dillard's work, is to discover — or rediscover — this magnificent, fiercely attentive writer who wakes up each day "expectant, hoping to see a new thing."

"A live wire … shooting out sparks," Dillard charges her prose with urgency. For the reader, who may be floating amiably through the day, perhaps looking but not seeing, she puts out the call: Wake Up! "We have less time than we knew," she writes.

What a joy it is to take a walk with Dillard, to see a "cloud in the sky suddenly lighted as if turned on by a switch," or in winter "peach limbs swept and poised just so, row upon row, like a stageful of thin, innocent dancers who will never be asked to perform."

Nature stirs her, but she's not satisfied until she examines "all things intensely and relentlessly. … Do not leave it, do not course over it as if it were understood, but instead follow it down until you see it in the mystery of its own specificity and strength," she writes in "A Writer in the World."

Dillard is a master of literary digression, what novelist Claire Messud called "a route to essence." Her idiosyncratic path may not suit all tastes, but following her brings surprise and illumination at every turn.

Her sly humor can sneak up on you, as in "The Weasel," when she finds herself "looking down at a weasel, who was looking up at me." The two are "stunned into stillness" and a brief stare-down, causing Dillard to wonder how the creature thinks. Gleefully, in "Being Chased," she recounts an exhilarating race with childhood friends as a man in a suit pursues them through backyards after they bombarded his Buick with snowballs.

With stirring language and powerful intellect, Dillard shows us what it means to be alive, to feel "the planet buck under you — rear, kick, and try to throw you — while you hang on to the ring." Relish the ride, for time is "pounding at you, time."

Elfrieda Abbe is a freelance critic and feature writer based in Milwaukee.

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The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New Hardcover – 15 March 2016

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In recognition of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author’s long and lauded career as a master essayist, a landmark collection, including her most beloved pieces and some rarely seen work, rigorously curated by the author herself.

“A writer who never seems tired, who has never plodded her way through a page or sentence, Dillard can only be enjoyed by a wide-awake reader,” warns Geoff Dyer in his introduction to this stellar collection. Carefully culled from her past work, The Abundance is quintessential Annie Dillard, delivered in her fierce and undeniably singular voice, filled with fascinating detail and metaphysical fact. The pieces within will exhilarate both admiring fans and a new generation of readers, having been “re-framed and re-hung,” with fresh editing and reordering by the author, to situate these now seminal works within her larger canon.

The Abundance reminds us that Dillard’s brand of “novelized nonfiction” pioneered the form long before it came to be widely appreciated. Intense, vivid, and fearless, her work endows the true and seemingly ordinary aspects of life—a commuter chases snowball-throwing children through neighborhood streets, a teenager memorizes Rimbaud’s poetry—with beauty and irony, inviting readers onto sweeping landscapes, to join her in exploring the complexities of time and death, with a sense of humor: on one page, an eagle falls from the sky with a weasel attached to its throat; on another, a man walks into a bar.

Reminding us of the indelible contributions of this formative figure in contemporary nonfiction, The Abundance exquisitely showcases Annie Dillard’s enigmatic, enduring genius, as Dillard herself wishes it to be marked.

• Print length 304 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Ecco
• Publication date 15 March 2016
• Dimensions 13.97 x 2.57 x 18.42 cm
• ISBN-10 0062432974
• ISBN-13 978-0062432971
• See all details

Frequently bought together

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

Product description

From the back cover.

“A writer who never seems tired, who has never plodded her way through a page or sentence, Dillard can only be enjoyed by a wide-awake reader,” warns Geoff Dyer in his introduction to this stellar collection. Carefully culled from her past work,  The Abundance  is quintessential Annie Dillard, delivered in her fierce and undeniably singular voice, filled with fascinating detail and metaphysical fact. The pieces within will exhilarate both admiring fans and a new generation of readers, having been “re-framed and re-hung,” with fresh editing and reordering by the author, to situate these now seminal works within her larger canon.

The Abundance  reminds us that Dillard’s brand of “novelized nonfiction” pioneered the form long before it came to be widely appreciated. Intense, vivid, and fearless, her work endows the true and seemingly ordinary aspects of life—a commuter chases snowball-throwing children through neighborhood streets, a teenager memorizes Rimbaud’s poetry—with beauty and irony, inviting readers onto sweeping landscapes, to join her in exploring the complexities of time and death, with a sense of humor: on one page, an eagle falls from the sky with a weasel attached to its throat; on another, a man walks into a bar.

Reminding us of the indelible contributions of this formative figure in contemporary nonfiction,  The Abundance  exquisitely showcases Annie Dillard’s enigmatic, enduring genius, as Dillard herself wishes it to be marked.

About the Author

Annie Dillard is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of  Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, An American Childhood, The Writing Life, The Living  and  The Maytrees . 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.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Ecco (15 March 2016)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 304 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0062432974
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0062432971
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 363 g
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 13.97 x 2.57 x 18.42 cm
• #288 in Literary Travel
• #1,316 in North American Literature Textbooks
• #5,606 in Travel Writing (Books)

About the author

Annie dillard.

Annie Dillard is the author of ten books, including the Pulitzer Prize-winner Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, as well as An American Childhood, The Living, and Mornings Like This. 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. Born in 1945 in Pittsburgh, Dillard attended Hollins College in Virginia. After living for five years in the Pacific Northwest, she returned to the East Coast, where she lives with her family.

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The abundance: narrative essays old and new audible audiobook – unabridged.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author

In recognition of her long and lauded career as a master essayist, a landmark collection including her most beloved pieces and some rarely seen work, rigorously curated by the author herself.

“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, Washington Post Book World)

“Annie Dillard is, was, and will always be the very best at describing the landscapes in which we find ourselves.” ( Minneapolis Star Tribune )

“Annie Dillard is a writer of unusual range, generosity, and ambition.... Her prose is bracingly intelligent, lovely, and human. ” (Margot Livesey, Boston Globe )

“A writer who never seems tired, who has never plodded her way through a page or sentence, Dillard can only be enjoyed by a wide-awake reader,” warns Geoff Dyer in his introduction to this stellar collection. Carefully culled from her past work, The Abundance is quintessential Annie Dillard, delivered in her fierce and undeniably singular voice, filled with fascinating detail and metaphysical fact. The pieces within will exhilarate both admiring fans and a new generation of readers and listeners, having been “re-framed and re-hung”, with fresh editing and reordering by the author, to situate these now seminal works within her larger canon.

The Abundance reminds us that Dillard’s brand of “novelized nonfiction” pioneered the form long before it came to be widely appreciated. Intense, vivid, and fearless, her work endows the true and seemingly ordinary aspects of life - a commuter chases snowball-throwing children through neighborhood streets, a teenager memorizes Rimbaud’s poetry - with beauty and irony, inviting listeners onto sweeping landscapes, to join her in exploring the complexities of time and death, with a sense of humor: On one page, an eagle falls from the sky with a weasel attached to its throat; on another, a man walks into a bar.

Reminding us of the indelible contributions of this formative figure in contemporary nonfiction, The Abundance exquisitely showcases Annie Dillard’s enigmatic, enduring genius, as Dillard herself wishes it to be marked.

• Listening Length 7 hours and 45 minutes
• Author Annie Dillard
• Narrator Derek Perkins, see all
• Audible release date May 11, 2021
• Language English
• Publisher HarperAudio
• ASIN B08VL6F8YP
• Version Unabridged
• Program Type Audiobook
• See all details

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The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New

Annie dillard. ecco, $25.99 (304p) isbn 978-0-06-243297-1.

Reviewed on: 11/09/2015

Genre: Nonfiction

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‘The Abundance,’ by Annie Dillard

By Donovan Hohn

• March 21, 2016
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THE ABUNDANCE Narrative Essays Old and New By Annie Dillard 271 pp. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers. $25.99.

Annie Dillard’s long career as a daredevil nonfiction aerialist began in October 1972, on a camping trip to the coast of Maine. She tells the story in the afterword to the 25th-anniversary edition of “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.” Twenty-seven years old, somewhere between her home in the suburban foothills of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains and Maine’s Acadia National Park, she’d picked up a “nature book” by a writer whose previous book she’d admired. His latest effort was a torpid disappointment. Wondering how fireflies make their light, the author hadn’t troubled himself to find out. Dillard, who had been troubling herself and finding things out since childhood, knew the answer to this entomological mystery: Fireflies possess a pair of substances with excellent names, luciferin and luciferase, that are crucial to their conversion of chemical energy to light. Far less explicable to her than the light of fireflies was the dimming of an author’s once-bright mind. “What on earth,” Dillard asked herself, “had happened to this man?” Here, too, she was prepared to hazard an answer: “Decades had happened, that was all.” She resolved to write about the world before she wearied of it, or lost her nerve.

Now that decades have happened to her, I wish I could travel back in time to deliver to that 27-year-old camper on the coast of Maine some reassuring news: On the page at least, nerve is something she would never run short of. As evidence, I’d present her with my review copy of “The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New.” In what feels like a valedictory collection, Dillard has ­selected, rearranged and in some cases retitled and revised 22 of the best essays she’s written over the last 40 years, curating what amounts to a retrospective exhibit of her own ­career. The time for a Dillard retrospective seems right. As Geoff Dyer notes in his foreword, the sort of “genre-resistant ­nonfiction” whose possibilities Dillard began scouting out in the early 1970s is now a recognized genre enjoying a vogue. Many readers and writers, Dyer among them, have followed her into those ­borderlands.

Dillard was a pioneer in another sense, daring at age 27 to nominate herself for membership in the explorers’ club of American letters whose most famous exemplars — Thoreau, Muir, Abbey — were men. Last year, profiling her in The Atlantic, Diana Saverin shared a savory quotation from the journals Dillard kept while struggling to write the book that would become “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek”: “It’s impossible to imagine another situation where you can’t write a book ’cause you weren’t born with a penis. Except maybe ‘Life With My Penis.’ ” (If you can almost hear a rim shot following that punch line, there are good reasons, divulged in one of the essays included here, “Jokes.”)

Having resolved on the coast of Maine to write about the world, Dillard took “Walden” for her model, a debt she acknowledges in “Heaven and Earth in Jest,” the opening chapter of “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” to which in “The Abundance” she’s given a more down-to-earth title, “On Foot in Virginia’s Roanoke Valley.” (Many of the alterations Dillard has made to her early work show an inclination to temper her youthful exuberances, tone things down, simplify. “Living Like Weasels,” a favorite with anthologists, is now “The Weasel.”) Like Thoreau, she exhibits in those early essays a knack for aphorism and parable. Like him, she makes her suburban surroundings seem wilder than they were, her adventures more solitary than they were, her pilgrim’s persona more self-reliantly masculine than she was — or he was.

Emerson exhorted poets to “magnify the small” and “micrify the great,” and Dillard knows as well as anyone, Thoreau included, how to put that bit of Emersonian theory into practice. Consider, for instance, the frog. If you’ve read “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” you know the frog I’m talking about, the one that makes a memorable appearance in the essay formerly known as “Heaven and Earth in Jest” — an appearance and disappearance both. Once you’ve read the relevant passage, watched the frog deflate and crumple before your eyes as a giant water bug turns it into an amphibian smoothie and sucks it dry, you can’t unread the passage, the side effects of which — as is often the case with Dillard — can be long-lasting. It’s a reviewer’s commonplace to praise a writer’s prose as hallucinogenic, but in Dillard’s case, the adjective fits: Her essays have been known to induce in their users visions of dreamlike intensity.

Even then, in the early 1970s, when she was writing under the influence of Thoreau, she was beginning to emerge from under it. She may be a latter-day Transcendentalist, but the century that separates her from her precursors matters. She knows her Thoreau, her Dickinson, her Merton, her Ecclesiastes, her Book of Job; she also knows her Darwin, her Einstein, her Oppenheimer, her luciferin and her luciferase. With others of her postwar, post-Hiroshima, post-Holocaust generation — Joan Didion comes to mind — she shares an apocalyptic streak. “Walden” is auroral, as if written by dawn’s light. “The Abundance” is crepuscular. Darkness keeps falling across the page. Readers seeking pretty glimpses of heaven on earth will find little comfort here. Humor, yes. And a fair portion of the beautiful and the sublime. A great deal of the sublime. But little comfort. Dillard has said she prefers what Neoplatonic Christians called the via negativa , the doubtful path to God. She may believe in a “created universe,” not an accidental one, but she does so while making herself stare — and making her readers stare — into the “unthinkable void” of space and time.

In arranging her retrospective exhibit, Dillard has abjured chronological order. The essays she wrote first arrive late. She chooses to begin instead with “Total Eclipse” and to end with “An Expedition to the Pole,” a pair of essays from her 1982 book “Teaching a Stone to Talk.” Together, framing the collection, these two essays lend it the shape of a “Divine Comedy.” “Total Eclipse” at first appears to be an account of the astronomical event named in the title, and for another writer — John McPhee, say — the astronomical event alone would have more than sufficed, but Dillard is a metaphysician, not an empiricist. Her preferred method is to transform, through the alchemy of metaphor, natural phenomena into spiritual ones. In her hands, the total eclipse, observed from a hillside in Washington’s Yakima Valley, becomes a descent into an underworld, a “region of dread.” Images of deep-sea diving recur. Blotting out the sun, the moon, like “a mushroom cloud,” obliterates “meaning itself.” The essay is her “Inferno.”

In “An Expedition to the Pole,” she counterpoints the history of polar exploration with a visit to a New Age Catholic church where the Mass is performed to the accompaniment of a folksy singalong. “I would rather, I think, undergo the ­famous dark night of the soul,” she writes, “than encounter in church the dread hootenanny.” Who wouldn’t? And yet, as she braids these two threads, the hootenanny and the expedition to the pole, they begin to combine and mingle in astonishing ways — like firefly enzymes, perhaps. An extended metaphor emerges, a kinship between worship and polar exploration that grows increasingly hallucinatory, until by the essay’s end, literalizing her metaphor, Dillard delivers us into a comical fantasia: The congregants of the Catholic church are now sharing an ice floe with survivors of doomed expeditions, and Dillard’s pilgrim of a narrator is banging a tambourine, joining in on the jamboree as she goes drifting toward the Pole of Relative Inaccessibility for which she has been “searching in the mountains and along the seacoasts for years.” This is nonfiction? Yes. It’s also Dillard’s “Paradiso,” as close to heaven on earth as she ever gets.

As “The Abundance” helps make clear, although “Pilgrim” remains her most famous book, it turns out to have also been her most conventional one. She showed more nerve later on, not less. In an essay omitted here, Dillard once extended a metaphor that compared her writing to the acrobatics of a stunt pilot. Though every one of them required nerve, not all the stunts she attempted came off, as she seems to recognize, looking back. Three of her books — “Holy the Firm,” “The Writing Life” and “Encounters With Chinese Writers” — are represented in “The Abundance” by a single essay each.

In her early work, Dillard tends to soar and sink on lyrical thermals and downdrafts, composing arias of figurative language, piling simile upon simile, image on image, and when I was myself in my 20s, I thrilled to the aerial show of her prose. I still do, though somewhat to my surprise the essay I found most powerful on this reading was “For the Time Being,” a selection from the book of that name, published in 1999, the latest of the eight books sampled here. In it, the figurative language and the lyricism and the flights of rhetoric and fancy have been boiled off, leaving a distillate of prose that is both crystalline and austere. Weaving together a natural history of sand and a fragmented biography of the French paleontologist and Jesuit priest Teilhard de Chardin, fellow traveler on the via nega­tiva, the essay represents a culmination, an ultima Thule, of Dillard’s late style, and possibly of her four-decade career.

I’d be remiss if I neglected to report that the book’s subtitle is a touch misleading. The newest of these 22 essays — one of two that can’t be found in a previous book — dates from 2005. Is it greedy to wish that there were more new offerings among the old? Is it indiscreet to wonder what Dillard has been up to since she published her second novel, “The May­trees,” almost a decade ago? Is it grim to worry that there won’t be more to come? That, as Dillard has suggested in interviews, the pilgrimage might be over? That this might be it? If this is it, if this is what the decades have done to her, to us, it will have been enough, more than. The title of “The Abundance” is not misleading in the slightest. What I mostly felt, reading it, was gratitude for the bounty.

A review on March 27 about “The Abundance,” a collection of essays by Annie Dillard, referred incorrectly to luciferin, a naturally occurring chemical involved in a firefly’s glow. Luciferin is the substrate in a chemical reaction catalyzed by the enzyme luciferase — it is not itself an enzyme.

The review also referred imprecisely to the chemical process of firefly bioluminescence. While luciferin and luciferase are crucial to that process, a simple combination of the two does not cause a firefly to glow — other chemical components, notably oxygen, are also required.

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Donovan Hohn is the author of “Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them.”

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The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New

• By Annie Dillard
• Reviewed by Kristina Moriconi
• March 11, 2016

An American writing giant is back with a sublime collection

For readers familiar with Annie Dillard’s work, The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New is a reassembling, a reordering. A reimagining within a different frame.

For readers new to Dillard’s writing, this collection, not unlike others she has written, is an adventure. It is like learning to read all over again. It is a reminder to see — to look and listen — more closely than ever before.

As always, reading Dillard is not to be taken lightly. There should be as little distraction as possible. And one should come to these pages prepared to reflect and interpret, to look for ways to connect what might seem disconnected.

With the exception of two very brief essays, the longer ones are divided into segments, a thin horizontal line (or a subtitle) separating them. So, in seeking connections, there is the question of what holds together the segmented pieces within an individual essay, and then there is the larger question of what holds together the collection as a whole. Why was each one chosen to sit beside the others? Their juxtaposition is a literary study in itself.

Somehow, they precede and follow one another comfortably without a sense of separateness, as though it had always been the author’s intention for them to be read in this order, in this re-collected way, decades of her writing about place distilled to the most unforgettable vista points along the way.

On these pages, readers have been invited to travel with Dillard on this journey. There is a stop along the way in the place where she is from, another stop where she is living, and yet more in the places she continues to go.

Readers are tasked with keeping up, staying with her in the present “today,” in the past “two summers ago,” and in the timeless mystery of “one night,” watching, through Dillard’s unflinching eye, the spectacle of a moth: “A golden female moth, a biggish one with a two-inch wingspan, flapped into the fire, dropped her abdomen into the wet wax — stuck, flamed, frazzled, and fried in a second.”

This description continues onto another page, then yet another, the body of the moth becoming a vehicle for Dillard’s lyrical voice: “And her head jerked in spasms, making a spattering noise; her antennae crisped and burned away and her heaving mouth parts cracked like pistol fire.”

In the foreword, Geoff Dyer writes: “Dillard opens our eyes to the world and to new ways of articulating what we see.” To read Annie Dillard’s latest collection of essays is to be a student of language and a student of the world — to look at everything, even the tiniest moments, with perpetual wonder.

Kristina Moriconi is a poet and essayist. She is the author of the chapbook No Such Place (Finishing Line Press, 2013). Her work has appeared in Cobalt Review, Change Seven, Crab Creek Review, december, and dozens of other literary journals. In 2014, she was named the Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, poet laureate. She earned her MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop in Tacoma, Washington, and she now lives and teaches in suburban Philadelphia.

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