A Desert Harvest
New and Selected Essays
ISBN10: 1250251125
ISBN13: 9781250251121
Trade Paperback
272 Pages
$21.00
CA$29.99
Occupying a space between traditional nature writing, memoir, journalism, and prose poetry, Bruce Berger’s essays are beautiful, subtle, and haunting meditations on the landscape and culture of the American Southwest. Combining new, unpublished essays with selections from his acclaimed trilogy of “desert books”—The Telling Distance, There Was a River, and Almost an Island—A Desert Harvest is a career-spanning selection of the best work by this unique and undervalued voice.
Wasteland architecture, mountaintop astronomy, Bach in the wilderness, the mind of the wood rat, the canals of Phoenix, and the numerous eccentric personalities who call the desert their home all come to life in these fascinating portraits of America’s seemingly desolate terrains.
Reviews
Praise for A Desert Harvest
"Berger is a chronicler of desert life in all its forms, from the cactuses to life in the small towns of the Southwest. [A Desert Harvest] spans a career of over 30 years, leaving readers with an impressionistic picture of a distinctly American ecology."—The New York Times Book Review
"A Desert Harvest renders Berger’s travels across the Southwest and down through Baja California Sur with plenty of charm and a comic sense for the surreal, but it also leaps beyond: into questions of water use or the substance of time . . . The book places him among the best of past generations to write about the Southwest."—Sean McCoy, The Los Angeles Times
"Cuts to the heart of the fierce and enduring attraction of the desert . . . A glowing appreciation for the landscape . . . radiates across Mr. Berger’s A Desert Harvest, a sublime assortment of new and selected essays . . . [Berger's writing is] poised, magisterial."—Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
"Captures the myriad ways the southwest desert casts a spell."—National Geographic
"When he hits the mark, there are few living writers more at home in desert country than Berger . . . Hit the mark he does here . . . Berger's essays in [A Desert Harvest] are pleasures to read."—Kirkus Reviews
Reviews from Goodreads
BOOK EXCERPTS
Read an Excerpt
INTRODUCTION: THE PIANO HAS BEEN THINKING
Colum McCann
The American musician John Cage is credited with helping to pioneer the idea of the prepared piano, where unusual items—among them tuning forks, screws, spoons, rubber...