Holy the Firm
by Annie Dillard | 
The Unspeakable
by Meghan Daum | 
Teaching a Stone to Talk
by Annie Dillard | 
A Field Guide to Getting Lost
by Rebecca Solnit | 
My Heart Is an Idiot
by Davy Rothbart | 
My Misspent Youth
by Meghan Daum | 
Teaching a Stone to Talk
by Annie Dillard | 
How to Write An Autobiographical Novel
by Alexander Chee | 
The Wrong Way to Save Your Life
by Megan Stielstra | 
Trick Mirror
by Jia Tolentino | 
On the Pleasure of Hating
by William Hazlitt | 
The Givenness of Things
by Marilynne Robinson | 
Pieces of the Frame
by John McPhee | 
This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage
by Ann Patchett | 
Alibis
by Andre Aciman | 
The Disappointment Artist
by Jonathan Lethem | 
Prisons We Choose to Live Inside
by Doris Lessing | 
The Woman at the Washington Zoo
by Marjorie Williams | 
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
by Annie Dillard | 
Arguably
by Christopher Hitchens |
National Bestseller "Beautifully written and delightfully strange--. As earthy as it is sublime, For the Time Being is, in the truest sense, an eye- opener."--Daily News 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, haunting, For the Time Being evokes no less than the terrifying grandeur of all that remains tantalizingly and troublingly beyond our understanding. "Stimulating, humbling, original--. [Dillard] illuminate[s] the human perspective of the world, past, present and future, and the individual's relatively inconsequential but ever so unique place in it."--Rocky Mountain News From the Trade Paperback edition.