The Nature Book

Symphonic, both in its structure-four movements, the third of which is the most distinct and the last of which references the first and goes out in a brilliant burst-and in the way language echoes, builds, works its accretive magic. . . . Seeing the world like this, without us, traversed in a way we could never traverse it in our human bodies, is a powerful and exhilarating experience. -Cara Blue Adams, The New Yorker A meditative, lush narrative on the relationship between time and nature. . . . Like Proust, Comitta centers you in the reading experience, not just demanding your labor of comprehension at the languorous, long sentence level, but also requiring your attention and patience. . . . You'll be hard-pressed to find another book with as verdant an archive of beautiful descriptive sentences as the one contained in The Nature Book. -Darina Sikmashvili, Los Angeles Review of Books Their authorial vision weaves together a wild variety of styles with a steady eye on the land, sky, and water, as well as on the plants and animals living in each. Comitta approaches assembly with a conceptual rigor, but they do not sacrifice polish or readability. The novel flows beautifully. . . . An optimistic critique of the form, made entirely of the form. -Crow Jonah Norlander, BOMB Magazine A magnum opus about the planet using only found text. . . . A dynamic and singular reading experience. -Kirkus, starred review An immersive exhibition of nature writing. . . . [The Nature Book] pulls the reader along with gorgeous language and animal protagonists worth rooting for. -Publishers Weekly In this seamless anthology, we forget that the experience of reading about nature is mediated by human voices and, when suspended in the text, succumb to the magical illusion that we are perceiving the world in itself. -Will Chancellor, The Brooklyn Rail An epic journey-visual, textural and musical-that illustrates the vastness of our environment and its representation in literature. -Joseph Holt, Star Tribune Here it is at last, and what a bloody relief to at last have it: The Novel Without Us. Using the suprasensory medium of the human vessel Tom Comitta, the trees and sky and earth have accessed the hyperobject or hyperartifact known as 'literature' in order to be heard from, across time and space. This is a novel to dwarf all others. -Jonathan Lethem Tom Comitta's original novel-composed of descriptions of animals, plants, weather, water, earth, time and space from canonical English-language works-is a feat of conceptual art, biblical in tone and panoramic in scope. The absence of human life in The Nature Book is a relief and a delight, yet Comitta's devotion to the 'ancillary' builds a subtle and uncomfortable portrait of human consciousness: its judgments and observations, its habit of projecting itself into the minds of animals, and its tendency to see the natural world in terms of how it resembles, serves, or threatens the human one. -Kathryn Scanlan In The Nature Book, language denuded from its original context serves its own surprising ends. An astounding project. -Jarett Kobek