For the Time Being

National Bestseller

"Beautifully written and delightfully strange...as earthy as it is sublime...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

• Holy the Firm
• Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters
• Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (Harper Perennial Modern Classics)
• The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New
• The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution (Great Discoveries)
• Day of the Dead: When Two Worlds Meet in Oaxaca
• An American Childhood
• The Writing Life
• The Living: A Novel
• The Maytrees: A Novel