It is thanks to his Pilgrimage to Tinker Creek (Christian Bourgois, 1990, Pulitzer prize for essay in 1975) that several readers discovered Annie Dillard. A group of eleven authors gathered around the journal Backlight wanted to pay tribute to this American born in 1945 and celebrate the remarkable acuity of her gaze, she who was able to elevate her walks and her “fictionalized essays” to the rank of “true expeditions of the mind”, in the wake of a Henry David Thoreau. If she “sharpened the eye, cleansed the ears” of Robert Lalonde – despite the French translations which would be “to tear one’s understanding” -, for Frédérique Bernier, she embodies “what a body carried by words can which catapult him to the level of the unheard of”. Thomas Mainguy, Mélissa Grégoire and Luba Markovskaia, among others, also express their admiration for the author ofLearn to talk to a stonewhose work swings between down-to-earth testimony and the mysticism of crossroads.
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