The Nature Book, Tom Comitta
The Nature Book, Tom Comitta
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The Nature Book

Author: Tom Comitta

Narrator: Josh Bloomberg

Unabridged: 9 hr 49 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 07/18/2023


Synopsis

Part sweeping evocation of Earth's rhythms, part literary archive, part post-human novel, The Nature Book collages descriptions of the natural world into a singular symphonic paean to the planet.

What does our nature writing say about us, and more urgently, what would it say without us? Tom Comitta investigates these questions and more in The Nature Book, a "literary supercut" that arranges writing about the natural world from three hundred works of fiction into a provocative re-envisioning of the novel. With fiction's traditional background of flora and fauna brought to the fore, people and their structures disappear, giving center stage to animals, landforms, and weather patterns—honored in their own right rather than for their ambient role in human drama. The Nature Book challenges the confines of anthropocentrism with sublime artistic vision, traversing mountains, forests, oceans, and space to shift our attention toward the magnificently complex and interconnected world around us.

About Tom Comitta

Tom Comitta is the author of Airport Novella and First Thought Worst Thought: Collected Books 2011-2014, a print and digital archive of forty "night novels," art books, and poetry collections. Comitta's fiction and essays have appeared in WIRED, Lit Hub, Electric Literature, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Believer, BOMB, and Best American Experimental Writing 2020. They live in Brooklyn.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Alvaro on July 16, 2023

Unlike nothing I've ever read. This book has such a simple concept but it's very original and well executed. The author took excerpts from over 300 books where nature is being described, then cut and pasted them together into this 'novel'. These are parts of a book that are usually skipped or conside......more

Goodreads review by LC on January 18, 2024

Liquid gold drips from the pages of this if you dare to let it seep.........more

Goodreads review by Chasqui on March 23, 2025

3 stars Lowkey the introduction and afterword are more interesting than the actual book, but I guess that’s kinda the point huh......more

Goodreads review by Romane on April 17, 2024

"This novel contains no words from me," the author writes by way of introduction. that's pretty unsettling, isn't it? the nature book is unlike anything i’ve ever read. it's a collage, a mosaic of the most beautiful passages ever written about nature. the author has carefully selected them and trans......more

Goodreads review by Jo on April 18, 2023

It’s a beautiful piece. It is a relaxing read when I leaned into that nature is the main character. I’m enjoying reading passages to my son as we sit in our beautiful back yard in north FL at sunset. I think many of them could be written about what we see there.......more