The Nature Book -- Tom Comitta, Paperback

Part sweeping evocation of Earth's rhythms, part literary archive, part post-human novel, The Nature Book collages descriptions of the natural world into a singular symphonic paean to the planet.

What does our nature writing say about us, and more urgently, what would it say without us? Tom Comitta investigates these questions and more in The Nature Book, a "literary supercut" that arranges writing about the natural world from three hundred works of fiction into a provocative re-envisioning of the novel. With fiction's traditional background of flora and fauna brought to the fore, people and their structures disappear, giving center stage to animals, landforms, and weather patterns--honored in their own right rather than for their ambient role in human drama. The Nature Book challenges the confines of anthropocentrism with sublime artistic vision, traversing mountains, forests, oceans, and space to shift our attention toward the magnificently complex and interconnected world around us.

Author: Tom Comitta
Publisher: Coffee House Press
Published: 03/14/2023
Pages: 272
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.80lbs
Size: 8.20h x 5.50w x 1.20d
ISBN: 9781566896634

Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 01/15/2023
Publishers Weekly 03/13/2023

About the Author

Tom Comitta is the author of 〇, Airport Novella, and First Thought Worst Thought: Collected Books 2011-2014, a print and digital archive of forty "night novels," art books, and poetry collections. Comitta's fiction and essays have appeared in WIRED, Lit Hub, Electric Literature, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Believer, BOMB, and Best American Experimental Writing 2020. They live in Brooklyn.