Annie Dillard, author of "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek," is a poet, essayist, novelist, and mystic whose work defies categorization. Over 40 years, she has blended transcendent insight with ordinary detail, finding wonder in snails, fireplaces, and socks. Her new collection, "The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New," spans her career, beginning with her 1974 debut "Tickets for a Prayer Wheel" and the Pulitzer-winning "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek." Three early, previously unpublished essays are now featured: "Recalling Niels Bohr" and "Lonesome, With Snails," both built around seemingly weak jokes—a fireplace that cools a room, a snail called "short." Dillard revises relentlessly, believing her work to articulate the mind’s contact with the world is never complete.

She sees humor and poetry as "machines made out of words," using the mundane to reveal the miraculous. In "An American Childhood," she recalls her Pittsburgh upbringing as an apprenticeship in wisecracking. Her mission: to crowbar surprise into ordinary experience, sentence by sentence, with only a ballpoint pen, calling for fireworks in the quiet gaps of life.