THE TEN GREATEST ESSAYS, EVER
Gretel Ehrlich
Henry David Thoreau, “Ktaadn,”
(from The Maine Woods, 1846)
John Berger, “8 “
(from Here is Where We Meet, 2005)
Annie Dillard, “Total Eclipse”
(from Teaching A Stone To Talk, 1982)
Susan Sontag, “The Conscience of Words”
(from At the Same Time, 2007)
Gary Snyder, “Good Wild Sacred”
(from The Practice of the Wild, 2004)
Roger Deakin, “Daydreaming Has Been My Undoing”
(from Notes from Walnut Tree Farm, 2008)
Richard Mabey, “Fancy Work”
(from Nature Cure, 2005)
Edward Hoagland, “The Ridge-Slope Fox and the Knife Thrower”
(from Heart’s Desire, 1988)
Junichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows
(from Leete’s Island Books, 1933)
Joseph Brodsky, “To Praise a Shadow”
(from Less Than One, 1986)
About Gretel Ehrlich
Gretel Ehrlich is the author of thirteen books, including a novel, a short story collection, three collections of poems, and seven books of essays, among them A Match to the Heart, This Cold Heaven, John Muir: Nature’s Visionary, The Solace of Open Spaces, and the enormously popular Islands, the Universe, Home, which was described by the San Francisco Chronicle as “A volume of ten deep, wandering essays that at times are so point blank vital you nearly need to put down the book to settle yourself.” Ehrlich’s work regularly appears in Outside, Audubon, The National Geographic, Architectural Digest, The New York Times Magazine, and Harper’s, and has been awarded fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Rockefeller Foundation.