The Shell Collector: Stories - Softcover

Doerr, Anthony

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1439190054 ISBN 13: 9781439190050

Publisher: Scribner Book Company, 2011

Synopsis

The "perilously beautiful" (Boston Globe) first story collection by the author of the acclaimed Pulitzer Prize-winning #1 New York Times bestseller All The Light We Cannot See.

The exquisitely crafted stories in Anthony Doerr's debut collection take readers from the African Coast to the pine forests of Montana to the damp moors of Lapland, charting a vast physical and emotional landscape. Doerr explores the human condition in all its varieties--metamorphosis, grief, fractured relationships, and slowly mending hearts--conjuring nature in both its beautiful abundance and crushing power. Some of the characters in these stories contend with hardships; some discover unique gifts; all are united by their ultimate deference to the ravishing universe outside themselves.

About this title

Review

"The Shell Collector is breathtaking.... Perilously beautiful." --Boston Globe

"Doerr's prose dazzles, his sinewy sentences blending the naturalists' unswerving gaze with the poet's gift for metaphor."--The New York Times Book Review

"Anthony Doerr is a gifted and fearless new writer. He is absolutely unafraid to take on the biggest themes of the human condition, always writing about heroes and their various epic journeys. The Shell Collector is unforgettable--not so much a book of short stories as a book of short myths."--Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love

From the Back Cover

'His fingers dug the shell up, he felt the sleek egg of its body, the toothy gap of its aperture. It was the most elegant thing he'd ever held. "That's a mouse cowry," the doctor said. "A lovely find. It has brown spots, and darker stripes at its base, like tiger stripes. You can't see it, can you?" But he could. He'd never seen anything so clearly in his life.’

In this assured, exquisite debut, Anthony Doerr takes readers from the African coast to the suburbs of Ohio, from sideshow pageantry to harsh wilderness survival, conjuring nature in both its beautiful abundance and its crushing power. The blind hero of the title story spends his days roaming the beaches of Kenya, his fingers ploughing through sandy granules of grace and intrigue, his German shepherd at his side. And then there are whale-watchers and fishermen, hunters and mystics, living lives uncompleted or undone, caught, memorably, as they turn toward the reader.

A natural storyteller, Doerr explores the human dilemma in all its manifestations: longing, grief, indecision, heartbreak and slow, slow recuperation. Shimmering with elegance and invention, The Shell Collector is an enchanting and imaginative book by a young writer just setting off on what will surely be a hugely compelling literary odyssey.

About this edition

• Publisher: Scribner Book Company
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1439190054
• ISBN 13: 9781439190050
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240