Now Comes Good Sailing: Writers Reflect on Henry David Thoreau

by Andrew Blauner (Editor)

Overview

From twenty-seven of today’s leading writers, an anthology of original pieces on the author of Walden

Features essays by Jennifer Finney Boylan • Kristen Case • George Howe Colt • Gerald Early • Paul Elie • Will Eno • Adam Gopnik • Lauren Groff • Celeste Headlee • Pico Iyer • Alan Lightman • James Marcus • Megan Marshall • Michelle Nijhuis • Zoë Pollak • Jordan Salama • Tatiana Schlossberg • A. O. Scott • Mona Simpson • Stacey Vanek Smith • Wen Stephenson • Robert Sullivan • Amor Towles • Sherry Turkle • Geoff Wisner • Rafia Zakaria • and a cartoon by Sandra Boynton

The world is never done catching up with Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), the author of Walden, “Civil Disobedience,” and other classics. A prophet of environmentalism and vegetarianism, an abolitionist, and a critic of materialism and technology, Thoreau even seems to have anticipated a world of social distancing in his famous experiment at Walden Pond. In Now Comes Good Sailing, twenty-seven of today’s leading writers offer wide-ranging original pieces exploring how Thoreau has influenced and inspired them—and why he matters more than ever in an age of climate, racial, and technological reckoning.

Here, Lauren Groff retreats from the COVID-19 pandemic to a rural house and writing hut, where, unable to write, she rereads Walden; Pico Iyer describes how Thoreau provided him with an unlikely guidebook to Japan; Gerald Early examines Walden and the Black quest for nature; Rafia Zakaria reflects on solitude, from Thoreau’s Concord to her native Pakistan; Mona Simpson follows in Thoreau’s footsteps at Maine’s Mount Katahdin; Jennifer Finney Boylan reads Thoreau in relation to her experience of coming out as a trans woman; Adam Gopnik traces Thoreau’s influence on the New Yorker editor E. B. White and his book Charlotte’s Web; and there’s much more.

The result is a lively and compelling collection that richly demonstrates the countless ways Thoreau continues to move, challenge, and provoke readers today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691215228
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	10/19/2021
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	683,494
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.60(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Andrew Blauner is a literary agent and the editor of seven previous anthologies, including Coach: 25 Writers Reflect on People Who Made a Difference, The Peanuts Papers: Writers and Cartoonists on Charlie Brown, Snoopy & the Gang, and the Meaning of Life, and In Their Lives: Great Writers on Great Beatles Songs. Facebook.com/ThoreauAnthology

Table of Contents

Preface Andrew Blauner xi

Acknowledgments xiii

Excursions Near and Far

Wild Apples Lauren Groff 3

My Guidebook to Japan Pico Iyer 13

Walden and the Black Quest for Nature, or My Summer Vacation with Big Sis Gerald Early 23

Twenty-Four Hours on Pea Island Jordan Salama 41

The Fragility of Solitude Rafia Zakaria 51

My Failure Mona Simpson 62

Without Megan Marshall 70

Deliberate Living

To a Slower Life Alan Lightman 95

Walden as an Art Robert Sullivan 104

The Year of Not Living Thickly Sherry Turkle 118

If I Had Loved Her Less Jennifer Finney Boylan 127

Following Thoreau Kristen Case 148

Directions of his Dreams

Thoreau on Ice George Howe Colt 161

"The Record of My Love": Thoreau and the Art of Science Michelle Nijhuis 176

The Apples of His Eye A. O. Scott 188

You Bring the Weather with You Zoë Pollak 198

Thoreau in Love James Marcus 206

Practicalities

As for Clothing Amor Towles 219

On Pencils and Purpose Celeste Headlee 227

The House That Thoreau Built Paul Elie 238

Is It Worth the While? Geoff Wisner 249

A Few Elements of American Style Adam Gopnik 259

At Walden

Concord Is a Kind of Word Will Eno 271

Dolittle's Rebellion Stacey Vanek Smith 287

Ice, for the Time Being Tatiana Schlossberg 301

Walden at Midnight: Three Walks with Thoreau Wen Stephenson 310

Simplify, Simplify Sandra Boynton 322

Notes 323

Contributors 339

Credits 347

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“As this book ably demonstrates, few writers have meant as much to other writers as Thoreau. He began a conversation that is still underway, one that gives off heat but far more light."—Bill McKibben, author of Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?

“Harangues, meditations, songs of praise, hymns to a darkness that awakens thought—all are here and more. In Now Comes Good Sailing, a rich kaleidoscope of responses address Thoreau’s relentless question: Where do we live now, and what do we live for? These essays bring Thoreau back to life, and ourselves back into relation with each other and our common world.”—Laura Dassow Walls, author of Henry David Thoreau: A Life

"What a brilliant collection of some of my favorite writers about my very favorite writer. How to live: That was the secret that Thoreau was uncovering, and this book offers us a map to just that."—David Gessner, author of Quiet Desperation, Savage Delight: Sheltering with Thoreau in the Age of Crisis

“In true Thoreauvian fashion, the pieces in Now Comes Good Sailing range widely and thoughtfully across topics and disciplines. The collection provides multiple points of entry for readers new to Thoreau, while also encouraging those already familiar with him to revisit his life and writings in creative and timely ways.”—James S. Finley, editor of Henry David Thoreau in Context

Editorial Reviews

08/09/2021

Literary agent Blauner (In Their Lives: Great Writers on Great Beatles Songs) brings together in this dynamic collection 27 essays on the life of Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) and his most famous work, Walden; or, Life in the Woods. The contributors address what about Thoreau’s life and writing inspired them, and what he has to say to readers today. In “My Guidebook to Japan,” Pico Iyer writes that Thoreau’s essays taught him how to appreciate Kyoto, Japan, “by learning to look at everything around me.” Alan Lightman suggests in “To a Slower Life” that the naturalist’s work is a reminder to get back to the beauty of wasting time, while Sherry Turkle writes in “The Year of Not Living Thickly” that technology has made people fearful of the solitude that was so important to Thoreau. In “ ‘The Record of My Love’: Thoreau and the Art of Science,” Michelle Nijhuis honors the author’s close-observation skills. Taken together, the pieces make a convincing case that Thoreau’s work is ever-relevant and deserving of continued wide readership: “Even you, paltry worried creature of the twenty-first century—reach through the general then into particular and then into the stuff of self,” urges Lauren Groff. Thoreau fans will be delighted. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"A remarkable anthology. . . . Blauner’s table of contents reads like a ‘Who’s Who of Intelligent Modern Prose’. . . . This collection amplifies the wisdom of Thoreau for an age that is frequently hard of hearing."—-John Kaag, New York Times

"Many of the 27 pieces gathered in Andrew Blauner’s anthology Now Comes Good Sailing, by such leading lights as Jennifer Finney Boylan, Adam Gopnik, Lauren Groff and Geoff Wisner, . . . emphasize Thoreau’s exuberant and often funny side, though none do this as memorably as George Howe Colt’s ‘Thoreau on Ice’. . . . And what a wonder to read, in James Marcus’s ‘Thoreau in Love,’ how the erotically stunted Henry opened his heart to Emerson’s wife, Lidian, imagining how, together, they would ‘splice the heavens.’"—-Christoph Irmscher, Wall Street Journal

"A rich new anthology."—-Nina MacLaughlin, Boston Globe

From the Publisher

"Most readers will experience this anthology as a welcome imperative, an invitation to take up Thoreau once again."

Choice

2021-07-18
A collection of celebrations of the iconic writer.

“There are many ways to read Thoreau,” Pico Iyer observes, “but none of them will ever be so deep as the ways he reads us, and our most private longings, often so well-hidden that we forget about them ourselves.” In graceful, often lyrical essays, the 26 contributors to Blauner’s thoughtful collection echo Iyer as they consider Thoreau’s meaning in their lives. Most respond to Walden, a book that novelist Amor Towles and NPR reporter and host Stacey Vanek Smith loved passionately when they first read it but others (novelist Lauren Groff, English professor Kristen Case) hated, put off by Thoreau’s tone of moral superiority. On later readings, though, their perceptions changed dramatically. “I discovered a love so powerful for Thoreau’s energetic vision that it often took my breath away,” Groff writes. His “great contribution to literature,” she realized, “lies in the wild strangeness of his close reading of nature, the intensity of his insistence that if one looks hard enough, one will see through the scrim of the familiar and into the astonishing gift of singularity.” Several contributors consider Thoreau’s celebration of solitude. In our wired age of smartphones and the internet, solitude, writes media scholar Sherry Turkle, is challenged by our “habit of turning to our screens rather than looking inward, and by the culture of continual sharing.” Alan Lightman asks himself what he loses “when I must be engaged with a project every hour of the day, when I rarely let my mind spin freely without friction or deadlines, when I rarely sever myself from the rush and the heave of the external world.” Rafia Zakaria, a Pakistani essayist and historian, visiting Thoreau’s farm, thought about “the moral complications” of the solitude that Thoreau chose for himself. Other contributors include Adam Gopnik, Jennifer Finney Boylan, and A.O. Scott.

Candid, often insightful reflections testify to Thoreau’s enduring appeal.

Kirkus Reviews