The Annie Dillard Reader [Paperback]

Annie Dillard (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Harpercollins (1994)
• ASIN: B000OEJU6C
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,697,664 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

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.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Indispensable, November 14, 2001

By 

Francisco X. Stork (Boston MA, United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Annie Dillard Reader (Paperback)

You have read all of Annie's books. Some more than once. Still, this is a good book for you. It's a little heavy but worth putting in your briefcase and lugging around. Who ever said that beauty comes without effort? So you have the book with you and now if you find yourself in a deserted island, or stranded in the Canadian wilderness in the middle of winter, you are safe. When your soul aches, there is comfort. As you walk to catch the evening train after another day of struggle, the very weight of the book lightens your step. On the train ride home you open it at random and, slowly, light filters in. Sometimes, you soar and loop the air and land gingerly, as if nothing had happened. You read other books. You have to. Still, you carry this book in addition to. You carry it like what? A spare tire? An extra oxygen tank? Maybe. A soft wool blanket. To throw over your heart when it starts getting cold. It's not just little pieces of remembered joy all bound in one. It's that she picked these writings herself and in so doing created something new. There is also this: you can see how The Living was born, see it also reduced to its essence. You see also the works as one work, one life, one life span. So structured, images and themes, recur and bounce, blend and bifurcate, a symphony, a palette, a Fourth of July firework bursting into a million stars, against the dark night sky.

2 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Annie Dillard Reader, October 3, 2005

By 

A. Swadell - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Annie Dillard Reader (Paperback)

Not too fast (took 17 days), but product is as described; thanks