For the Time Being : Essays (PEN Literary Award Winner)

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and one of the most compelling writers of our time comes a "beautifully written and delightfully strange" (Daily News) narrative that renews our ability to discover wonder in life's smallest—and often darkest—corners.

For the Time Being is Annie Dillard's most profound narrative to date. With her keen eye, penchant for paradox, and yearning for truth, Dillard asks: 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.

"Beautifully written and delightfully strange...as earthy as it is sublime...in the truest sense, an eye-opener." —Daily News


"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