Living to Prowl

Reading Pickering is like taking a walk with your oldest, wittiest friend, saidSmithsonian magazine.Living to Prowl, Sam Pickering's ninth collection of essays, finds the acclaimed author walking familiar paths, taking time to enjoy family, friends, nature, and other simple pleasures.Like Pickering's earlier books, this collection records in highly personal and idiosyncratic terms a year in the life of a man with a tenacious commitment to pausing and wondering. Moving easily between humor and seriousness, the mundane and the philosophical, stark truth and evocative fictions, his essays saunter through life and rummage through lives. As Pickering himself puts it,Living to Prowlis meant to make people "turn away from the 'razzleum-dazzleum' of dream and abstraction to see the rich greens and blues at their doorsteps."

Sam Pickering is a professor of English at the University of Connecticut. He has written eight other essay collections, including A Continuing Education and The Right Distance (Georgia). He lives in Storrs, Connecticut.