A Desert Harvest: New and Selected Essays

by Bruce Berger, Colum McCann (Introduction)

Overview

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 Combining new, unpublished essays with selections from his acclaimed trilogy of “desert books”—The Telling Distance, There Was a River, and Almost an Island—A Desert Harvest is a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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374220570
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	03/12/2019
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.30(h) x 2.00(d)

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.

Editorial Reviews

12/10/2018

Poet and essayist Berger (The End of the Sherry) reminisces in this collection about his life in the American Southwest and South America, capturing the effects of arid yet vibrant landscapes on the psyche. These lyrical, usually brief pieces delight—and sometimes frustrate—in their insistence on specificity. Berger watches an eclipse in Bolivia, where the influx of tourists pales in comparison to attendance at Carnaval, and, in a single-page essay, proposes that desert sunsets are most awe-inspiring when one looks eastward, at the “last rays, deflected through clear skies, fall on the long, minutely eroded mountain ranges and bathe our eyes with light of decreasing wavelength and cooling colors.” Even in pieces less directly concerned with the desert, Berger remains focused on place. In one of the longer essays, he reflects on how the English word privacy has recently entered the Bolivian vocabulary, perhaps due to large numbers of Bolivians returning home from living in the “privacy-oriented States.” At times, the essays meander and get bogged down in detail, but at their best, Berger imbues his rich images with an enticing sense of narrative possibility and symbolic meaning. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

"A Desert Harvest renders Berger’s travels across the Southwest and down through Baja California Sur with plenty of charm and a comic sense for the surreal, but it also leaps beyond: into questions of water use or the substance of time . . . The book places him among the best of past generations to write about the Southwest." —Sean McCoy, The Los Angeles Times

"Captures the myriad ways the southwest desert casts a spell." —National Geographic

"Berger is a chronicler of desert life in all its forms, from the cactuses to life in the small towns of the Southwest. [A Desert Harvest] spans a career of over 30 years, leaving readers with an impressionistic picture of a distinctly American ecology." —The New York Times Book Review

"When he hits the mark, there are few living writers more at home in desert country than Berger . . . Hit the mark he does here . . . Berger's essays in [A Desert Harvest] are pleasures to read." —Kirkus Reviews

"Cuts to the heart of the fierce and enduring attraction of the desert . . . A glowing appreciation for the landscape . . . radiates across Mr. Berger’s A Desert Harvest, a sublime assortment of new and selected essays . . . [Berger's writing is] poised, magisterial." —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

From the Publisher

2018-11-13

A collection of essays set in the deserts of the southwestern United States and northwestern Mexico.

When he hits the mark, there are few living writers more at home in desert country than Berger (The End of the Sherry, 2014, etc.), at least since the passing of Edward Abbey and Charles Bowden. Hit the mark he does here, and often, as with a longish early essay on the memories shaped by arriving in Phoenix at the age of 8, at the very beginning of the postwar boom, and experiencing over the years the profound changes that have taken place there—changes that have played out in the big picture but also in the vegetation around his family home, marked by the arrival of Audubon's warblers in the metropolis, pecking away at the bottom of drained irrigation canals. The author's affectionate portrait of one of the strangely brilliant hermits that the desert seems to breed—this one a fellow who somehow had divined the presence of mountains on Venus before NASA got there—is a hallmark of generously diplomatic writing. Sure, the guy was a little sundazed, but he was on to something, too: "Slight, bespectacled, pencil and Kleenex stuck in his pocket, jeans rolled over his boots, he looked like a professor gone to seed." At times, however, Berger strives a little too hard for literary effect, as when he writes of an unfortunately pruned desert willow, "it looked like an angst-ridden prop from Waiting for Godot," and when he opines that Spanish is "a language raucous as the desert birds," which takes some of the fine polish off an otherwise unobjectionable piece in which Edna St. Vincent Millay and Willa Cather figure. Throughout, however, one gets the sense that Berger would be a welcome presence at a desert campfire, spinning sometimes-improbable but well-formed tales.

Abbey and Bowden did it better, but many of Berger's essays in this loose-knit collection are pleasures to read.

Kirkus Reviews