Field Notes

In this new collection of twelve stories, one of our most admired writers evokes the longing we feel for beauty in our relationships with one another, with the past, with nature, In these stories, we find men or women - sometimes at odds with themselves, sometimes transcendently well grounded - who have an experience that is profound, unsettling, and oddly liberating. In "Empira's Tapestry," a gravely ill woman begins to weave a luminous cloth in which is expressed all of the fervent desire she had for her life...In "Homecoming," a botanist has become so caught up with his academic ambitions that he forgets the names of the wildflowers in his own woods until his young daughter reteaches him...And in "The Entreaty of the Wiideema," an anthropologist traveling with an aboriginal people finds that, because of his aggressive desire to understand them, they remain for him always disturbingly unknowable.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.