Things That Are: Essays [Paperback]

From the cosmic to the quotidian, this collection of essays by Amy Leach asks us to reconsider our kinship with the wild world.

The debut collection of a writer whose accolades precede her: a Whiting Award, a Rona Jaffe Award, aBest American Essaysselection, and a Pushcart Prize, all received before her first book-length publication. This book represents a major break-out of an entirely new brand of nonfiction writer, in a mode like that of Ander Monson, John D’Agata, and Eula Biss, but a new sort of beast entirely its own.

Things That Aretakes jellyfish, fainting goats, and imperturbable caterpillars as just a few of its many inspirations. In a series of essays that progress from the tiniest earth dwellers to the most far flung celestial bodies—considering the similarity of gods to donkeys, the inexorability of love and vines, the relations of exploding stars to exploding sea cucumbers—Amy Leach rekindles a vital communion with the wild world, dormant for far too long.Things That Areis not specifically of the animal, the human, or the phenomenal; it is a book of wonder, one the reader cannot help but leave with their perceptions both expanded and confounded in delightful ways.

Sheer scrambling delight. —Lawrence Weschler

“One of the most exciting and original writers in America.” —Yiyun Li

Loopy, mad-hatterish, infernally addictive writing that makes you sneeze. —David Abram

You need this book. —Seth Marko,UCSD Bookstore

I haven’t seen such imagination and magical use of language in nature writing since I first read Annie Dillard’sPilgrim at Tinker Creek. —Dale Szczeblowski,Porter Square Books

If you love words and the natural world, Amy Leach will lead you through the world with new eyes. —Jeanne Costello,Maria's Bookshop

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