In her new essay collection, the beloved author of High Tide in Tucson brings to us, out of one of history's darker moments, an extended love song to the world we still have.

Whether she is contemplating the Grand Canyon, her vegetable garden, motherhood, genetic engineering, or the future of a nation founded on the best of all human impulses, these essays are grounded in the author's belief that our largest problems have grown from the earth's remotest corners as well as our own backyards, and that answers may lie in both those places.

Sometimes grave, occasionally hi...
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Author Barbara Kingsolver and her family abandoned the industrial-food pipeline to live a rural life--vowing that, for one year, they'd only buy food raised in their own neighborhood, grow it themselves, or learn to live without it. Part memoir, part journalistic investigation, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is an enthralling narrative that will open your eyes in a hundred new ways to an old truth: You are what you eat.

L on Bloy: A Study in Impatience is neither criticism nor canonization. Instead, Albert B guin simply presents the person and the preacher of the "Pilgrim of the Absolute," a man with brilliant insights into the world as it could be and terrible impatience with the world as it was. Bloy's writings shed a tremendous, at times blinding, light upon the central mysteries of human existence. Readers who have encountered Bloy in his novels or in his diary (The Pilgrim of the Absolute) will find in B guin a worthy guide in the journey to understanding--and respec...
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Many critics agree with C. S. Lewis that ""Satan is the best drawn of Milton's characters."" Satan is certainly a wonderful creation, but Adam and Eve are also complex and well-drawn, and God may be the most complicated character of all. Paradise Lost is above all God's story; it is his discontent, first with Lucifer and then with human beings, that drives the action from the beginning until his anger subsides at the world's end.

God and Satan have similarities not only in their pursuit of revenge, but also in their craving for power and glory. The ambitious Satan wants more ...
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When he accepted the invitation to deliver the Jefferson Lecture--our nation's highest honor for distinguished intellectual achievement--Wendell Berry wanted a fresh start, not only in looking at the groundwork of the problems facing our nation and the earth itself, but in gaining hope from some examples of repair during Late Capitalism. The result is the greatest speech he has delivered in his six decades of public life. With this transcript of his speech, along with heretofore uncollected essays, It All Turns on Affection will take its place as another major testament to Berry's co...
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