The Annie Dillard Reader (association copy)
NY: HarperCollins, 1994. First edition. Hardcover. An association copy, inscribed on the title page to National Book Award-winning novelist Robert Stone and his wife: "For Janice and Bob, love Annie." Also signed in full by Dillard lower on the page.
Robert Stone and Dillard were good friends, and Dillard wrote a brief, quirky tribute to him after his passing, which notes how they spent significant time together, for example: "We rented a tiny cabin in northern Montana, north of Choteau. Bob and Janice spent the week with us. I woke early one morning and found Bob sitting at a kitchen counter. He’d been up all night with an idea. He was outlining the narrative. I think that was Outerbridge Reach." Dillard's husband, the biographer Robert Richardson, also wrote a moving remembrance, sharing: "He loved to go fishing. We went fishing for big Spanish mackerel with his grandson out in the Gulf Stream off Key West; we went fishing for yellowtail another time off Cottrell Key. . . . And then there was a river-rafting trip down the Salmon River in Idaho in the early 1990s. . . . Some of us had inflatable kayaks. But seated close together on the center thwart of the big raft in the middle of the river was Robert Stone, with Marilynne Robinson on one side of him and Annie Dillard on the other. The three friends, all wearing life jackets, talked theology as the sun blazed down and the raft bucked and leaped, taking on water, spinning wildly in the currents, rocking from side to side, roaring down rapids, Stone and friends and the river all in full spate cascading merrily between stony banks and silent trees. The frantically busy boatman, [guide/writer Cort] Conley, who fully understood that he had modern American literature in his keeping that day, pushed and shoved on long polelike oars, as the three writers rose to the task of settling the hash of the universe, and fishing for answers." We wish we had been a trout off the bow on that trip so that we could have been reeled in!
The Annie Dillard Reader collects some of her most famous essays, choice poems, a piece of The Living, the entirety of Holy the Firm, and excerpts from An American Childhood and her Pulitzer Prize-winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. It's a great tour through the core of her career. A fine copy in a fine jacket. A wonderful association
. Fine / Fine. Item #1259
ISBN: 9780060171582
Price: $750.00 save 5% $712.50