When I first read Pilgrim as a college freshman, I’d never encountered anything like Dillard’s genre-defying reflections on the changing seasons in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. This is a book that changed my life.

I love Annie Dillard. From the publisher: "In this compelling assembly of writings, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard explores the world of natural facts and human meanings."

From the publisher: "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. 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."

Frederick Buechner in the New York Times Book Review calls this "A book of great richness, beauty and power. Dillard's description of the moth's death makes Virginia Woolf's go dim and Edwardian. One thinks of Gerard Manley Hopkins, among others--nature seen so clear and hard that the eyes tear...A rare and precious book."

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard changed my life. I had never encountered reflections like hers, and she quickly became one of my favorite writers. Annie’s honestly, combined with her impeccable prose, make her a wonderful guide. She’s honest about the difficulties, the torture that often accompanies creative work. She even says she HATES writing. Yet her words still make me want to write.