Into Woods

by Bill Roorbach

Overview

Into Woods is an exuberant, profound, and often wonderfully funny account of ten years in the life of author Bill Roorbach. A paean to nature, love, family, and place, it begins with his honeymoon on a wine farm in France's Loire Valley and closes with the birth of his daughter and he and his wife's return to their beloved Maine.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781608935130
Publisher:	Down East Books
Publication date:	09/15/2015
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	190
Sales rank:	1,087,708
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Bill Roorbach is the author of the O’Henry Award-winning story collection Big Bend, as well of the novels The Smallest Color, Life among Giants, and The Remedy for Love. He also wrote the memoir, Summers with Juliet and the essay collection Into Woods. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including The Atlantic, Harper’s Monthly, Granta, and the New York Times magazine. He lives with his family in Farmington, Maine.

Table of Contents

1. Honeymoon 2. Into Woods 3. Spirits 4. Shitdiggers, Mudflats, and the Worm Men of Maine 5. You Have Given This Boy Life 6. Vortex 7. Duck Day Afternoon 8. Birthday 9. Scioto Blues 10. Sky Pond 11. My Life as a Move

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"In these vigorous, boisterous, and earthy essays, Bill Roorbach gives us a shrewdly candid self-portrait, while telling us reams about what it means to be a man. He writes confidently and confidingly, elegantly, and articulately." — Phillip Lopate "Here is a narrator who makes you glad to be alive, giddy to be in his presence, grateful to love friends and family and dogs with generosity and abandon, to show tenderness and thus be saved by strangers." — Melanie Rae Thon

Editorial Reviews

Fiction writer Roorbach's first collection of personal essays, Summers with Juliet, traced his courtship of his wife and ended with their wedding. Into Woods continues their story, moving from the honeymoon to university teaching to settling in Maine. Roorbach's writing continues to be that freewheeling mixture of nature writing, personal detail, humor, philosophy, and social commentary that makes his personal essays unique. His self-deprecating humor is especially evident in "Honeymoon," an essay describing the couple's time in France, where his landlords, a farm family, love Juliet but snub her idle writer husband. The strain on the family caused by moving for jobs is a theme of the final essay, "My Life as a Move," in which the author describes giving up "probably the best creative writing job in America" to pursue a dream, find a home, and raise the couple's child. Roorbach won the 2001 Flannery O'Connor Award in short fiction for Big Bend: Stories. Recommended for both public and academic libraries. Nancy P. Shires, East Carolina Univ., Greenville, NC Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

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