Annie Dillard excerpt and audio clip

NPR's summer reading list comments on Annie Dillard's second novel, The Maytrees, and also provides both an excerpt from the novel and an audio clip of her reading a passage:

Robert Louis Stevenson, he read in his Letters, called marriage "a sort of friendship recognized by the police." Charmed, Maytree bought a red-speckled notebook to dedicate to this vexed sphere — not to marriage, but to love. More red-speckled notebooks expanded, without clarifying, this theme. Sextus Propertius, of love: "Shun this hell." From some book he copied: "How does it happen that a never-absent picture has in it the power to make a fresh, overwhelming appearance every hour, wide-eyed, white-toothed, terrible as an army with banners?" She was outside his reach.

Her website says, "NPR in June will air some tiny segments about THE MAYTREES taped long ago". So there will be more!

This is the first book I've ordered directly from Amazon to be shipped internationally (worth every penny). It should be here the first week of July...hopefully.

(via Counterbalance)