Audiobooks by Annie Dillard

Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

In this dazzling collection, Annie Dillard explores the world over, from the Arctic to the Ecuadorian jungle, from the Galapagos to her beloved Tinker Creek. With her entrancing gaze she captures the wonders of natural facts and human meanings: watching a sublime lunar eclipse, locking eyes with a wild weasel, or beholding mirages appearing over Puget Sound through summer. Annie Dillard is one of the most respected and influential figures in contemporary nonfiction and winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Teaching a Stone to Talk illuminates the world around us and showcases Dillard in all her enigmatic genius.

Annie Dillard (Author), Randye Kaye (Narrator)

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The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New

Pulitzer Prize-Winning AuthorIn 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 "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.

Annie Dillard (Author), Susan Ericksen (Narrator)

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For the Time Being

From Annie Dillard, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and one of the most compelling writers of our time, comes For the Time Being, her most profound narrative to date. With her keen eye, penchant for paradox, and yearning for truth, Dillard renews our ability to discover wonder in life's smallest-and often darkest-corners. Why do we exist? Where did we come from? How can one person matter? Dillard searches for answers in a powerful array of images: pictures of bird-headed dwarfs in the standard reference of human birth defects; ten thousand terra-cotta figures fashioned for a Chinese emperor in place of the human court that might have followed him into death; the paleontologist and theologian Teilhard de Chardin crossing the Gobi Desert; the dizzying variety of clouds. Vivid, eloquent, and haunting, For the Time Being evokes no less than the terrifying grandeur of all that remains tantalizingly and troublingly beyond our understanding.

Annie Dillard, Janet Stevens (Author), Tavia Gilbert (Narrator)

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The Writing LIfe

Annie Dillard, Janet Stevens (Author), Tavia Gilbert (Narrator)

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The Writing Life

With color, irony, and sensitivity, Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Dillard illuminates the dedication, absurdity, and daring that is the writer's life. As it probes and exposes, examines and analyzes,The Writing Lifeoffers deeper insight into one of the most mysterious of professions. A gregarious recluse, Dillard has passed many days, weeks, and months in remote locations doing something she claims to hate: writing. The act of writing is quite the undertaking, as the author struggles to decide whether she has found her subject, hit a dead end, or come up with a truly inspired bit of literature. Here, on top of providing a glimpse into her own life and writing experiences, Dillard offers wisdom to aspiring and established writers, urging them to maintain their passion and commitment to the work.

Annie Dillard, Janet Stevens (Author), Tavia Gilbert (Narrator)

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An American Childhood

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. 'Dillard's luminous prose painlessly captures the pain of growing up in this wonderful evocation of childhood. Her memoir is partly a hymn to Pittsburgh, where orange streetcars ran on Penn Avenue in 1953 when she was eight, and where the Pirates were always in the cellar. Dillard's mother, an unstoppable force, had energies too vast for the bridge games and household chores that stymied her. Her father made low-budget horror movies, loved Dixieland jazz, told endless jokes and sight-gags, and took lonesome river trips down to New Orleans to get away. From this slightly odd couple, Dillard acquired her love of nature and taut sensitivity.''Publishers Weekly 'With'An American Childhood'Dillard helped usher in the age of memoirs'[and] defined a literary genre.''Washington Post

Annie Dillard, Janet Stevens (Author), Tavia Gilbert (Narrator)

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Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

In this classic of literary nonfiction, Annie Dillard takes us through a year of on-foot explorations through her own landscape, bringing anecdotes, curiosities, and insights about all she observes and experiences. In the summer, she stalks muskrats in the creek and thinks about wave mechanics; in the fall, she watches a monarch butterfly migration and dreams of Arctic caribou. She tries to con a coot, unties a snakeskin, witnesses a flood, and plays "King of the Meadow" with a field of grasshoppers. Throughout her wanderings, Annie Dillard's keen observations, poetic sensibilities, introspective reflections, and reverence for her surroundings show us the world outside as we have never seen it before. "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is a series of essays that combines scientific observation, philosophy, daily thoughts, and deeper introspection with glorious prose."-500 Great Books by Women

Annie Dillard (Author), Tavia Gilbert (Narrator)

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The Living

Annie Dillard (Author), Laurence Luckinbill (Narrator)

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The Maytrees

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.

Annie Dillard (Author), David Rasche (Narrator)

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An American Childhood

Sometimes there is an entire year that sparkles in the memory as a time brimming over with the fullness of life. By the age of 10, Annie's intervals of awakening began to occur more frequently; the hours and minutes of the years that followed were spent reveling in the delights and the anguishes that accompany being fully alive.

Annie Dillard (Author), Alexandra O'karma (Narrator)

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