Kingsolver

"Let me back up and say that I am breathless with gratitude for the collisions of choice and luck that have resulted in my being able to work under the full-on gaze of mountains and animate beauty. It's a privilege to live any part of one's life in proximity to nature. It is a privilege, apparently, even to know that nature is out there at all. In the summer of 1996 human habitation on earth made a subtle, uncelebrated passage from being mostly rural to being mostly urban. More than half of all humans now live in cities. The natural habitat of our species, then, officially, is steel, pavement, streetlights, architecture, and enterprise—the hominid agenda."

-Barbara Kingsolver, exerpt from one of the essays in her collection, Small Wonder.

Barabara Kingsolver's fiction is widely read. Most people know her these days by one of her newer novels, Poisonwood Bible, which is a story about a protestant preacher and his family who go to the African Congo to do missionary work. The things I like best about Kingsolver's writing are her imagery andthe way she incorporates nature into her story line and descriptions. She makes apt and illustrative comparisons between human beings, animals, and plants in order to explore humanity's relationship with nature. She can also write a great story plot, and her character development (in my opinion) is fluent.

Here is a clip from the audiotape. It is Kingsolver's reading of my favorite of her works, prodigal summer.

http://www.kingsolver.com/audio/prodigal_summer.rm

Here is her biblio.

Novels:
The Bean Trees (1988)
Animal Dreams (1990)
Pigs in Heaven (1993)
The Poisonwood Bible (1998)
Prodigal Summer (2001)

Nonfiction:
Holding the Line: Women in the Great ArizonaMine Strike of 1983 (1989)
High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never (1995)
Last Stand: America's Virgin Lands (2002)
Small Wonder: Essays (2002)

Collections:
Another America (1992)
Homeland and Other Stories (1999)