Description
2nd Edition, with 9 new drawings by Etel Adnan.
Originally published in 1986, JOURNEY TO MOUNT TAMALPAIS is at once a deep study and a love letter of and to a mountain. A prose essay written with the lyricism and precision of a master poet, Wendell Berry calls it "one of the major works of the 'spirit of place' in contemporary literature."
With a career spanning decades, genres, and nations, Etel Adnan's contributions to the fields of poetry, painting, philosophy, and journalism are indelible. In JOURNEY TO MOUNT TAMALPAIS, her alchemical command of language is enhanced by the use of painting and drawing as exploratory tools in a meditative practice of perception—what Omar Berrada in the book's afterword calls "a form of listening that transfigures the relation between subject and object, that reaches into layers of history buried underground." Adnan's encounter with the Mountain, as both its witness and its collaborator, results in this tour de force of ecological, political and poetic expression. JOURNEY TO MOUNT TAMALPAIS remains one of her most beloved works and a stunning example of her marriage of the visual and literary arts.
Literary Nonfiction. California Interest. Art.
Author Bio
Etel Adnan was born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1925. She is a celebrated writer, essayist, and playwright, and is the author of more than twenty books in all these disciplines. Her work as a whole is a faithful record of the times and places she has lived in Beirut, Paris, and in the San Francisco Bay Area. At least eighteen works by Adnan have been published in English. They include SITT MARIE ROSE (Post-Apollo Press, 1982); THE ARAB APOCALYPSE (Post-Apollo Press, 1989); SEA AND FOG (Nightboat Books, 2012), winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry and the California Book Award for Poetry; PREMONITION (Kelsey Street Press, 2014); Surge (Nightboat Books, 2018); TIME (Nightboat Books, 2019), winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Best Translated Book Award; and most recently Shifting the Silence (Nightboat Books, 2020). Her paintings, described by New York Times art critic Roberta Smith as "stubbornly radiant abstractions," have been widely exhibited. Spanning media and genres, Adnan's writings have led to numerous collaborations with artists and musicians, including the French part of CIVIL warS, a multi-language opera by American stage director Robert Wilson, performed in Lyon and Bobigny in 1985. In 2014 she was named Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, France's highest cultural honor, by the French Government. She currently resides in Paris.
Author City: SAUSALITO, CA USA