Photograph by Phyllis Rose

Also in the category of Books I’ve Been Waiting Ages For is Annie Dillard’s new novel The Maytrees, due this summer from Harper Collins (Amazon has it listed for preordering, which means that it must be more than smoke and mirrors).

Ms Dillard has kept a very low profile since For The Time Being, her last “new” book, came out in 2001 (The Living, her last — and first — novel, was published in 1992). I wrote briefly about “The Two of Us”, a small piece from Dillard that was published in the November 2003 issue of Harper’s, and I now see from referenced characters that it was an extract from the work-in-progress.

A New York friend and contact passed on the following tidbit about the forthcoming novel as posted some time ago in Publishers Marketplace:

“Annie Dillard’s THE MAYTREES, about love, death, and family set in the wild sand dunes of Provincetown in the 1940s and 50s, following the courtship, marriage, and separation of Toby and Lou Maytree, to [editor] Tim Duggan at Harper, for publication in summer 2007, by [agent] Timothy Seldes of Russell & Volkening.”

Not much to go on there but I guess it will have to do until this summer. While you’re waiting, why not rummage around¹ Annie Dillard’s website which has undergone a much-needed redesign, and features a new author photograph (reproduced above).

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¹ Some wonderfully scathing self-assessments can be found in the site’s Uncollected Essays page. Of her 1987 essay To Fashion a Text Dillard states: “This is emphatically not interesting; I renounce it.”; referring to the 1997 essay Advice for Young Writers, she advises: “Do not read this crap.”