Annie Dillard – författare

Pulitzerprisvinnare om livets stora och små mysterier

Under sina dagliga utflykter i landskapet runt ån Tinker Creek iakttar Annie Dillard naturens skiftningar och djurlivet som omger henne. Dessa iakttagelser, utspridda över fyra årstider, blir utgångspunkten för ett djupare utforskande av frågor som rör såväl skönhet och brutalitet som Guds närvaro i världen. Dillard har kallts för »Thoreaus sanna arvinge«, och hon beskrev själv Pilgrim vid Tinker Creek som »en teologisk bok«. När den gavs ut 1974 blev den en omedelbar succé både hos kritiker och läsare. Sedan dess har människor världen över fortsatt slå följe med Dillard under hennes vandringar, och låtit sig hänföras av hennes reflektioner över livets stora och små mysterier.I översättning av Roland Adlerberth och med ett nyskrivet förord av Erik Bergqvist, poet och kritiker.

ANNIE DILLARD, född 1945 i Pittsburgh, är en amerikansk författare. Hon har publicerat såväl poesi, essäer och skönlitteratur som litterär kritik och memoarer. Mest känd är hon för Pilgrim vid Tinker Creek som 1975 tilldelades Pulitzerpriset för bästa facklitterära bok.

I mitten av 1970-talet slår sig författaren Annie Dillard ned i ett hus vid Stillahavskusten, ensam med en katt, en spindel och ett stort fönster med utsikt mot havet. Under sina två år vid Pugetsundet ställer hon sig frågor om tid, verklighet, offerdöd och Guds vilja. 

I Grunden den heliga skriver hon om en mal som förtärs av en ljuslåga, en sjuårig flicka som brännskadas i en flygolycka, ett dop på en strand, klippiga berg och salta hav. Resultatet är en lysande essä om livets skönhet och grymhet. 

Annie Dillard (f. 1945) debuterade med diktsamlingen Tickets for a Prayer Wheel 1974 och fick ett omedelbart genombrott året därpå med sin Pulitzerprisbelönade första prosabok, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Dillard framstår som en modern naturfilosof, en Henry David Thoreau för vår tid. Tillsammans med Joan Didion representerar hon amerikansk nonfiction när den är som mest enastående. ellerströms har tidigare gett ut Dillards Att lära en sten att tala. Expeditioner och möten (2015).

Toby Maytree first sees Lou Bigelow on her bicycle in postwar Provincetown, Massachusetts. Her laughter and loveliness catch his breath. Maytree is a Provincetown native, an educated poet of thirty. As he courts Lou, just out of college, her stillness draws him. Hands-off, he hides his serious wooing, and idly shows her his poems.

In spare, elegant prose, Dillard traces the Maytrees'' decades of loving and longing. They live cheaply among the nonconformist artists and writers that the bare tip of Cape Cod attracts. Lou takes up painting. When their son Pete appears, their innocent Bohemian friend Deary helps care for him. These people are all loving, and ironic. Theirs is a simple and bold story.

In this moving novel, Dillard intimately depicts nature''s vastness and nearness. She presents willed bonds of loyalty, friendship, and abiding love. Warm and hopeful, The Maytrees is the surprising capstone of Annie Dillard''s original body of work.

“Remarkable. . . . A deftly woven narrative saturated with violence, hardship, and triumph. Readers will be richly rewarded, for by the end of this deeply felt novel it is hard to let the frontier town and its people go.”  — San Francisco Chronicle

This New York Times bestselling novel by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard is a mesmerizing evocation of pioneer life navigated by European settlers and Lummi natives in the Pacific Northwest during the last decades of the 19th century.

The Living is a tale full of gold minors, friendly railroad speculators, doe-eyed sweethearts, shifty card players, and 19th century adventures that will stay with you long after you close the book.

“Brilliant. . . . A shimmering meditation on the ebb and flow of love.”  — New York Times

“In her elegant, sophisticated prose, Dillard tells a tale of intimacy, loss and extraordinary friendship and maturity against a background of nature in its glorious color and caprice. The Maytrees is an intelligent, exquisite novel.” — The Washington Times

Toby Maytree first sees Lou Bigelow on her bicycle in postwar Provincetown, Massachusetts. Her laughter and loveliness catch his breath. Maytree is a Provincetown native, an educated poet of thirty. As he courts Lou, just out of college, her stillness draws him. He hides his serious wooing, and idly shows her his poems.

In spare, elegant prose, Dillard traces the Maytrees'' decades of loving and longing. They live cheaply among the nonconformist artists and writers that the bare tip of Cape Cod attracts. When their son Petie appears, their innocent Bohemian friend Deary helps care for him. But years later it is Deary who causes the town to talk.

In this moving novel, Dillard intimately depicts willed bonds of loyalty, friendship, and abiding love. She presents nature''s vastness and nearness. Warm and hopeful, The Maytrees is the surprising capstone of Dillard''s original body of work.

"[An American Childhood] combines the child''s sense of wonder with the adult''s intelligence and is written in some of the finest prose that exists in contemporary America. It is a special sort of memoir that is entirely successful...This new book is [Annie Dillard''s] best, a joyous ode to her own happy childhood."  — Chicago Tribune

A book that instantly captured the hearts of readers across the country, An American Childhood is Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard''s poignant, vivid memoir of growing up in Pittsburgh in the 1950s and 60s. 

Dedicated to her parents - from whom she learned a love of language and the importance of following your deepest passions - this narrative tale will resonate for everyone who has ever recalled with longing playing baseball on an endless summer afternoon, caring for a pristine rock collection, or knowing in your heart that a book was written just for you. 

"A collection of meditations like polished stones--painstakingly worded, tough-minded, yet partial to mystery, and peerless when it comes to injecting larger resonances into the natural world." — Kirkus Reviews

Here, in this compelling assembly of writings, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard explores the world of natural facts and human meanings.

Veering away from the long, meditative studies of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek or Holy the Firm, Annie Dillard explores and celebrates moments of spirituality, dipping into descriptions of encounters with flora and fauna, stars, and more, from Ecuador to Miami.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize

“The book is a form of meditation, written with headlong urgency, about seeing. . . . There is an ambition about her book that I like. . . . It is the ambition to feel.” — Eudora Welty, New York Times Book Review

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is the story of a dramatic year in Virginia''s Roanoke Valley, where Annie Dillard set out to chronicle incidents of "beauty tangled in a rapture with violence."

Dillard''s personal narrative highlights one year''s exploration on foot in the Virginia region through which Tinker Creek runs. In the summer, she stalks muskrats in the creek and contemplates wave mechanics; in the fall, she watches a monarch butterfly migration and dreams of Arctic caribou. She tries to con a coot; she collects pond water and examines it under a microscope. She unties a snake skin, witnesses a flood, and plays King of the Meadow with a field of grasshoppers. The result is an exhilarating tale of nature and its seasons.

“Remarkable. . . . A deftly woven narrative saturated with violence, hardship, and triumph. Readers will be richly rewarded, for by the end of this deeply felt novel it is hard to let the frontier town and its people go.”  — San Francisco Chronicle

This New York Times bestselling novel by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard is a mesmerizing evocation of pioneer life navigated by European settlers and Lummi natives in the Pacific Northwest during the last decades of the 19th century.

The Living is a tale full of gold minors, friendly railroad speculators, doe-eyed sweethearts, shifty card players, and 19th century adventures that will stay with you long after you close the book.

A beautiful repackaging of Annie Dillard''s classic work of literary criticism.

"Everyone who timidly, bombastically, reverently, scholastically--even fraudulently--essays to ''live the life of the mind'' should read this book. It''s elegant and classy, like caviar and champagne, and like these two items, it''s over much too soon." — Carolyn See, Los Angeles Times

Living by Fiction is written for--and dedicated to--people who love literature. Dealing with writers such as Nabokov, Barth, Coover, Pynchon, Borges, García Márquez, Beckett, and Calvino, Annie Dillard shows why fiction matters and how it can reveal more of the modern world and modern thinking than all the academic sciences combined. Readers of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, An American Childhood, and Holy the Firm will recognize Dillard''s vivid writing, her humor, and the lively way she tackles the urgent questions of meaning in experience itself.

"[In] this anthology of well-chosen excerpts by a satisfyingly diverse group of writers....the truth of their lives shines from every beautifully, often courageously composed page."— Booklist

“Packed with superb writing.” — New York Newsday

Modern American Memoirs is a sampling from 35 quintessential 20th century memoirs, including contributions from Margaret Mead, Malcolm X, Maxine Hong Kingston, Loren Eisely, and Zora Neale Hurston. Supremely written and excellent examples of the art of biography, these excerpts present a beautifully wide range of American life.

"For nonwriters, it is a glimpse into the trials and satisfactions of a life spent with words. For writers, it is a warm, rambling, conversation with a stimulating and extraordinarily talented colleague." — Chicago Tribune

From Pulitzer Prize-winning Annie Dillard, a collection that illuminates the dedication and daring that characterizes a writer''s life.

In these short essays, Annie Dillard—the author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and An American Childhood—illuminates the dedication, absurdity, and daring that characterize the existence of a writer. A moving account of Dillard’s own experiences while writing her works, The Writing Life offers deep insight into one of the most mysterious professions.

"[This] is a book of great richness, beauty and power and thus very difficult to do justice to in a brief review...The violence is sometimes unbearable, the language rarely less than superb. Dillard''s description of the moth''s death makes Virginia Woolf''s go dim and Edwardian. Nature seen so clear and hard that the eyes tear...A rare and precious book." — Freferick Buechner, New York Times Book Review

From Pulitzer Prize-winning Annie Dillard, a book about the grace, beauty, and terror of the natural world. 

In the mid 1970s, Annie Dillard spent two years on an island in Puget Sound in a room with a solitary window, a cat, and a spider for company, asking herself questions about memory, time, sacrifice, reality, death, and God. Holy the Firm, the diary-like collection of her thoughts, feelings, and ruminations during this time, is a lyrical gift to any reader who have ever wondered how best to live with grace and wonder in the natural world.

"Found poems are to their poet what no-fault insurance is to beneficiaries: payoffs waiting to happen where everyone wins and no one is blamed. Dillard culls about 40 such happy accidents from sources as diverse as a The American Boys Handy Book (1882) and the letters of Van Gogh. . . . the poet aims for a lucky, loaded symbolism that catapults the reader into an epiphany never imagined by the original authors."  — Publishers Weekly

In Mornings Like This, beloved author Annie Dillard has given us a witty and moving collection of poems in a wholly original form, sure to charm her fans, both old and new.

Extracting and rearranging sentences from old and odd books—From D.C. Beard''s "The American Boys Handy Book" in 1882 to Van Gogh''s letters to David Greyson''s "The Countryman''s Year" in 1936—Dillard has composed poems on poetry’s most heartfelt themes of love, nature, nostalgia, and death. A unique, clever, and original collection, Dillard’s characteristic voice sounds throughout the pages.