Awards

• Winner of Washington Book Publishers 2015 Book Design & Effectiveness Competition: Illustrated Cover (Second Place).

Overview

Great blue herons, yellow birches, damselflies, and beavers are among the talismans by which Bill Roorbach uncovers a natural universe along the stream that runs by his house in Farmington, Maine. Populated by an oddball cast of characters to whom Roorbach (""The Professor"") and his family might always be considered outsiders, this book chronicles one man's determined effort—occasionally with hilarious results—to follow his stream to its elusive source. Acclaimed essayist and award-winning fiction writer Bill Roorbach uses his singular literary gifts to inspire us to laugh, love, and experience the wonder of living side by side with the natural world.

Full Product Details

9781608933938

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Reviews

Here is a narrator who makes you glad to be alive, giddy to be in his presence, grateful to love friends and family and dogs with generosity and abandon, to show tenderness and thus be saved by strangers, -- Melanie Rae Thon

There is poetry in Bill Roorbach's prose...his lyricism touched lightly with irony. Boston Globe Bill Roorbach is a brilliant guide to the natural world. Gracefully combining deep knowledge, lyrical description and wry humor, his writing draws you out of your chair and into a world of streams and meadows and trees and bugs and beavers. And it makes you want to stay there. The Seattle Times There are other autobiographical books about Maine, but Roorbach's writing is so compelling, his eye for the human condition so keen, that this is in a class of its own. Library Journal, Starred Review A celebration of life...deft and evocative, making small adventures loom large. Kirkus Reviews With a voice as pure and true as the stream itself, Roorbach limns a lyrical yet precise portrait of the life teeming along one deceptively simple yet richly essential part of the natural world. Booklist You'll be homesick for a place you've never visited. Playboy While genuine in his appreciation of Nature, Roorbach is the antithesis of the smug and self-absorbed Naturalist...Temple Stream is a moving book: thoughtful, precise, about much more than flora. The Believer

Author Information

Bill Roorbach is the author of the O.Henry Award-winning story collection Big Bend, as well of the novels The Smallest Color and Life Among Giants, now in development for an HBO series. He also wrote the memoir, Summers with Juliet and the essay collection Into Woods. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including the Atlantic, Harper's Monthly, Granta, and the New York Times Magazine. He lives with his family in Farmington, Maine.

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