Things That Are: Essays

ISBN: 1571313516

Author: Leach, Amy

Condition: Used

From the cosmic to the quotidian, this collection of essays by Amy Leach asks us to reconsider our kinship with the wild world.The debut collection of a writer whose accolades precede her: a Whiting Award, a Rona Jaffe Award, a Best American Essays selection, and a Pushcart Prize, all received before her first book-length publication. This book represents a major break-out of an entirely new brand of nonfiction writer, in a mode like that of Ander Monson, John DAgata, and Eula Biss, but a new sort of beast entirely its own.Things That Are takes jellyfish, fainting goats, and imperturbable caterpillars as just a few of its many inspirations. In a series of essays that progress from the tiniest earth dwellers to the most far flung celestial bodies-considering the similarity of gods to donkeys, the inexorability of love and vines, the relations of exploding stars to exploding sea cucumbers-Amy Leach rekindles a vital communion with the wild world, dormant for far too long. Things That Are is not specifically of the animal, the human, or the phenomenal; it is a book of wonder, one the reader cannot help but leave with their perceptions both expanded and confounded in delightful ways.

• Echoes of Ander Monson, John D'Agata, and Eula Biss | A literary descendant of Lewis Carroll and Emily Dickinson | Donald Barthelme's nature documentaries reimagined | Amy Leach, a rare writer fearlessly pursuing her muse | Leach and Solnit inspire hope beyond harrowing essays | Environmental writing, far from dry, shines in Leach's collection | Dr. Seuss' magical counterpart in Leach's dazzling essays