A Desert Harvest: New and Selected Essays

A career-spanning collection of Bruce Berger's beautiful, subtle, and spiky essays on the American desert

Occupying a space between traditional nature writing, memoir, journalism, and prose poetry, Bruce Berger's essays are beautiful, subtle, and haunting meditations on the landscape and culture of the American Southwest. Combining new, unpublished essays with selections from his acclaimed trilogy of "desert books"--The Telling Distance, There Was a River, and Almost an Island--A Desert Harvest is a career-spanning selection of the best work by this unique and undervalued voice.

Wasteland architecture, mountaintop astronomy, Bach in the wilderness, the mind of the wood rat, the canals of Phoenix, and the numerous eccentric personalities who call the desert their home all come to life in these fascinating portraits of America's seemingly desolate terrains.

Author: Bruce Berger
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 03/12/2019
Pages: 272
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.85lbs
Size: 8.30h x 5.60w x 1.10d
ISBN: 9780374220570

Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 12/01/2018
Publishers Weekly 12/10/2018
Shelf Awareness 03/15/2019

About the Author
Bruce Berger grew up in suburban Chicago. A poet and nonfiction writer, he is best known for a series of books exploring the intersections of nature and culture in desert settings. The first of these, The Telling Distance, won the 1990 Western States Book Award and the 1991 Colorado Book Award. His articles and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Sierra, Orion Magazine, Gramophone, and numerous literary quarterlies; his poems have appeared in Poetry, Barron's, Orion Magazine, and various literary reviews in the United States, Scotland, and India, and have been collected in Facing the Music.