Into Woods: Essays by Bill Roorbach - Hardcover

Roorbach, Bill

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0268031622 ISBN 13: 9780268031626

Publisher: Univ of Notre Dame Pr, 2002

Synopsis

Into Woods is an exuberant, profound, and often wonderfully funny account of ten years in the life of its award-winning author, Bill Roorbach. A paean to nature, to love, to family, and to place, Into Woods provides a sequel to Roorbach's first book, the critically acclaimed and popular Summers with Juliet, which traced Roorbach's courtship of Juliet Karelsen, ending with their wedding on the water. Into Woods begins with their honeymoon on a wine farm in the Loire Valley of France and closes with the birth of their new daughter and return to their beloved Maine. Thoroughly original, the essays of Into Woods blend journalism, memoir, personal narrative, nature writing, cultural criticism, and rare insight into a narrative of place, a meditation on being and belonging, love and death, wonder and foreboding. The title essay, Into Woods, is a portrait of the writer as a young man; it is also a hymn to work and men. This evocative essay sets the theme for the rest of the collection. Spirits, Shitdiggers, Mudflats, and the Worm Men of Maine, Duck Day Afternoon, Birthday, and Sky Pond all pay homage to Bill's life in Maine. You Have Given This Boy Life, perhaps the most hau

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Reviews

Fiction writer Roorbach's first collection of personal essays, Summers with Juliet, traced his courtship of his wife and ended with their wedding. Into Woods continues their story, moving from the honeymoon to university teaching to settling in Maine. Roorbach's writing continues to be that freewheeling mixture of nature writing, personal detail, humor, philosophy, and social commentary that makes his personal essays unique. His self-deprecating humor is especially evident in "Honeymoon," an essay describing the couple's time in France, where his landlords, a farm family, love Juliet but snub her idle writer husband. The strain on the family caused by moving for jobs is a theme of the final essay, "My Life as a Move," in which the author describes giving up "probably the best creative writing job in America" to pursue a dream, find a home, and raise the couple's child. Roorbach won the 2001 Flannery O'Connor Award in short fiction for Big Bend: Stories. Recommended for both public and academic libraries. Nancy P. Shires, East Carolina Univ., Greenville, NC
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Univ of Notre Dame Pr
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0268031622
• ISBN 13: 9780268031626
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 180