In Our Nature: Stories of Wilderness Hardcover – December 1, 2000
by Donna Seaman
 
A collection of unforgettable short stories offers an intriguing look at the relationship between nature and humankind, explores the human perception of nature, and examines the conflict between civilization and wildness in each individual, in works by Rick Bass, Margaret Atwood, Francine Prose, Barry Lopez, E. L. Doctorow, Chris Offutt, Rick DeMarinis, and others.
 
Amazon.com Review
Anthologies of contemporary nature writing are many, drawing on familiar writers such as Henry Thoreau and Annie Dillard to press the cause of the wild. Donna Seaman's collection is better focused, and more surprising, than most: confined to contemporary fiction, it encompasses work by writers such as Chris Offutt, Francine Prose, Rick DeMarinis, and Margaret Atwood, who are not often branded as "nature writers" (a class somehow outside the cultural mainstream), and it offers a refreshingly broad, intelligent view of what nature writing's possibilities can be.
Offutt, for instance, is represented by a brilliant, if perhaps downbeat, short story called "Barred Owl," in which an impromptu assignment in taxidermy unfolds as a moral tale of the need to connect with the world; Atwood takes a page from Kafka to recount her narrator's life as a bat ("Bats have a few things to put up with, but they do not inflict. When they kill, they kill without mercy, but without hate. They are immune from the curse of pity. They never gloat"); and Simon Ortiz, the great Acoma Indian short-story writer and poet, spins a wise tale that speaks to the limits of human understanding and scientific inquiry. Seaman also incorporates overlooked pieces by writers more closely identified with the outdoors, such as Rick Bass and Barry Lopez, but even these pieces are less about grizzly bears and wolves than about our longing to find a place in nature.
Urban or rural, polished or homespun, the writers she includes, as Seaman sagely notes, "write about wildness because they write about human nature; one doesn't exist without the other." Her book is a welcome addition to the library of nature-inspired literature. --Gregory McNamee
From Publishers Weekly
In a departure for DK Publishing, Booklist editor Donna Seaman collects 14 diverse and intriguing short works of fiction under the title Our Nature: Stories of Wildness. Contributors include popular nature writers like Linda Hogan and Diane Ackerman, who provides the foreword, and general fiction writers like Margaret Atwood, who suggests, fancifully, that she was a bat in a previous life. Recognizing that one need not write directly about nature to appreciate it, Rick Bass, Barry Lopez and E.L. Doctorow each explore how thin the line is that separates supposedly civilized beings from wild (or animalistic) behavior. With the freedom and expansiveness that fiction allows, each contributor shows how undeniably a part of nature we all are.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
 
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