Virga & Bone: Essays from Dry Places

by Craig Childs

Overview

"It's impossible to imagine another writer in America who is better than Craig Childs at elegizing the fearsome and confounding appeal of our most austere landscapes."
—KEVIN FEDARKO, author of The Emerald Mile

From the author of The Secret Knowledge of Water and Atlas of a Lost World comes a deeply felt essay collection focusing upon a vivid series of desert icons—a sheet of virga over Monument Valley, white seashells in dry desert sand, boulders impossibly balanced. Craig Childs delves into the primacy of the land and the profound nature of the more–than–human.

CRAIG CHILDS is the author of more than a dozen books on nature, adventure, and science, including The Secret Knowledge of Water and Atlas of a Lost World. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Outside. Recipient of the Ellen Meloy Desert Writers Award and the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award, he lives in Colorado.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781948814188
Publisher:	Torrey House Press
Publication date:	10/01/2019
Pages:	122
Sales rank:	468,506
Product dimensions:	4.20(w) x 6.80(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

CRAIG CHILDS is the author of more than a dozen books on nature, adventure, and science, including The Secret Knowledge of Water and Atlas of a Lost World. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Outside. Recipient of the Ellen Meloy Desert Writers Award and the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award, he lives in Colorado.

Table of Contents

[ancestral stories]

Stories I've Been Told — Shiprock

[solitude]

Being Alone — Stillwater Canyon

[erosion]

The Sculptor and the Rock — Dolores River Canyon

[permission]

Giving Back the Dead — Undisclosed Location

Editorial Reviews

★ 08/26/2019

Few writers can better express the strange vitality of desert landscapes than Childs (Atlas of a Lost World), as this brief but memorable trek through the American Southwest proves. The book’s eight essays reveal the desert as at once solid and ephemeral, a place where one can see “the planet falling into pieces over and over” through the effects of wind and “a circus of erosion.” Childs makes surprising, even paradoxical, observations throughout. Death Valley, he notes, soaks up every bit of water that falls, making it “ironically, a reservoir.” In a small plane, Childs pursues virga, downpours from rain clouds that evaporate before hitting the desert floor. When he flies through one, he learns that it is “as velveteen as it looks... I could have stayed inside its rain and barely gotten wet.” In an essay about the time he and a friend tried to sneak into Burning Man, he describes that, even while trying to hide in the desert’s immense expanse, “there is no invisibility here.” The Southwestern panorama unfolding over the course of this beautiful book will stay with readers long after they close the pages. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"Craig Childs is full of rawness and spark, just like the dry southwestern deserts he loves…Virga & Bone is about those places and the people who need them, abuse them, love them, and take them for granted."
—OUTSIDE

"Sumptuous and vivid in every instance. Childs writes with enviable concision and richness of depth in these miniature essays."
—THE UTAH REVIEW

"A meditation on the beauty and value of the untouched corners of the Southwest."
—CATALYST MAGAZINE

"Few writers can better express the strange vitality of desert landscapes than Childs, as this brief but memorable trek through the American Southwest proves. Childs makes surprising, even paradoxical, observations throughout. The Southwestern panorama unfolding over the course of this beautiful book will stay with readers long after they close the pages."
—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, starred review

"These essays thrive on immediacy and read with urgency."
—DURANGO TELEGRAPH

"It's impossible to imagine another writer in America who is better than Craig Childs at elegizing the fearsome and confounding appeal of our most austere landscapes."
—KEVIN FEDARKO, author of The Emerald Mile

"What gives life and what remains after death are clearly legible in the arid lands of the desert Southwest. Craig Childs knows how to read the beauties and the grotesqueries of this landscape… Informed by science, indigenous legend, and many nights spent in a sleeping bag tossed down on wild ground, Childs' explorations are a tall drink of water in troubled times."
—ALISON HAWTHORNE DEMING, author of Zoologies: On Animals & the Human Spirit

"Craig Childs takes us not only through the external landscapes of the huge and wondrous; he takes us into and through himself."
—MARY SOJOURNER, author of The Talker and 29

"A desert koan, Childs' latest is still and restive, full of unresolved pairings and brilliantly so. His 1,000–watt prose is as alive as the heat that makes the Mojave tick."
—ELIZABETH RUSH, author of Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore

"Tapping into the spring that informed his acclaimed The Secret Knowledge of Water, Childs lets flow another volume of desert tales. Virga & Bone is a tribute to the orphaned landscape of the borderlands, where a bullet–riddled washing machine, an ancient potsherd, or the abandoned possessions of immigrants trekking north are the historical markers."
—GREG CHILD, author of Over the Edge

"In the actual Southwest, blemishes count as much as beauty. Character abides in both, which is how Craig Childs sees it. And to see the desert through his eyes, as Virga & Bone allows us to do, is to glimpse its tangible, imperfect glory. This is a bright hard gem of a book."
—WILLIAM DEBUYS, author of A Great Aridness and The Last Unicorn

"An arid, haunting feast."
—REBECCA LAWTON, author of The Oasis This Time

"Childs is a master of bringing the outside inward."
—M. JOHN FAYHEE, author of Smoke Signals

"Craig Childs shows us how to look in ways that we might find our own unique contribution to a future where all life thrives."
—BROOKE WILLIAMS, author of Open Midnight

From the Publisher