{"product_id":"2940172746406","title":"Signs and Wonders: Dispatches from a time of beauty and loss","description":"\u003cb\u003eChosen as a 2021 `Book of the Year' in \u003ci\u003eThe Age\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eSydney Morning Herald\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eThe Australian Book Review. \u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003eLonglisted for the 2022 Nib Literary Awards.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe celebrated, Walkley Award-winning author on how global warming is changing not only our climate but our culture. Beautifully observed, brilliantly argued and deeply felt, these essays show that our emotions, our art, our relationships with the generations around us - all the delicate networks that make us who we are - have already been transformed.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e In \u003ci\u003eSigns and Wonders\u003c\/i\u003e, Falconer explores how it feels to live as a reader, a writer, a lover of nature and a mother of small children in an era of profound ecological change.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Building on Falconer's two acclaimed essays, `Signs and Wonders' and the Walkley Award-winning `The Opposite of Glamour', \u003ci\u003eSigns and Wonders\u003c\/i\u003e is a pioneering examination of how we are changing our culture, language and imaginations along with our climate. Is a mammoth emerging from the permafrost beautiful or terrifying? How is our imagination affected when something that used to be ordinary - like a car windscreen smeared with insects - becomes unimaginable? What can the disappearance of the paragraph from much contemporary writing tell us about what's happening in the modern mind?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Scientists write about a 'great acceleration' in human impact on the natural world. \u003ci\u003eSigns and Wonders\u003c\/i\u003e shows that we are also in a period of profound cultural acceleration, which is just as dynamic, strange, extreme and, sometimes, beautiful. Ranging from an `unnatural' history of coal to the effect of a large fur seal turning up in the park below her apartment, this book is a searching and poetic examination of the ways we are thinking about how, and why, to live now.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e `Only the finest of writers can hope to convey the mercurial nature of the times we are living though: the sense of slippage; of terror and beauty. Falconer is such a writer. \u003ci\u003eSigns and Wonders\u003c\/i\u003e is an essential collection.' \u003cb\u003eSophie Cunningham, author of \u003ci\u003eCity of Trees\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e `Delia Falconer is one of the best writers working today, and in \u003ci\u003eSigns and Wonders\u003c\/i\u003e she demonstrates everything that makes her writing so necessary. Brave, beautiful, and breathtaking in its elegance and intelligence, it is, quite simply, a marvel.' \u003cb\u003eJames Bradley\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e `Scintillating. Delia Falconer is at the peak of her powers as a critic, and as an observer of the natural world. \u003ci\u003eSigns and Wonders\u003c\/i\u003e looks outward from Sydney, and from literature, to trace the contours of our environmental moment.' \u003cb\u003eRebecca Giggs, author of \u003ci\u003eFathoms\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e `Exquisite ... From reflections on feeding birds, analyses of literary trends, to Falconer's Covid and fire diaries, the essays are complex, ambitious, rewarding ... Delia Falconer's mesmerising \u003ci\u003eSigns and Wonders\u003c\/i\u003e helps us to process the disorienting complexity of living in this time of great beauty and loss.' \u003cb\u003eJonica Newby, \u003ci\u003eAustralian Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e","brand":"Simon \u0026 Schuster Australia","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47100319924464,"sku":"2940172746406","price":21.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/2940172746406_p0.jpg?v=1763846328","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/2940172746406","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}