Animal, Vegetable, Miracle
A Year of Food Life
Barbara Kingsolver
with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver

            The secret hideaway of a long-forgotten goat, the flowers of a peanut plant nosing their way into the dirt, the lost art of turkey sex:  New York Times bestselling author Barbara Kingsolver takes readers to places they never dreamed in her first book of narrative non-fiction—places she has found in her own kitchen and her own backyard. In Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (HarperCollins; May 1, 2007; $26.95), Kingsolver chronicles the year she and her family ate only locally produced food, much of which they grew or raised themselves.

            "Our family set out to find ourselves a real American culture of food, or at least the piece of it that worked for us, and to describe it for anyone who might be looking for something similar," Kingsolver writes. "This book tells the story of what we learned, or didn’t; what we ate, or couldn’t; and how our family was changed by one year of deliberately eating food produced in the same place where we worked, loved our neighbors, drank the water, and breathed the air." During the one-year cycle, they ate seasonally, consuming foods only as they became available in their own garden or from neighboring farms. "Our highest shopping goal," Kingsolver explains, "was to get our food from so close to home that we’d know the person who grew it."

            For Kingsolver, a novelist who trained as a biologist, the colorful events of the year provide the springboard for deeper exploration of the larger issues at stake. Agribusiness has changed the way we Americans eat, selling us ingredients we may not want, or even recognize. Every calorie of processed food we presently eat has used dozens or even hundreds of fossil fuel calories in its making and transportation, she points out. By eating locally, even just part of the time, we can save millions of barrels of oil as we consume a healthier and much more flavorful diet. Kingsolver investigates what was lost in the century when most of us forgot the tastes of fruits and vegetables fresh from the farm.

As the family makes its way through the year, they reap the benefits of their hard work in the quality of their meals and a deeper connection with their habitat and food chain. A road trip through sustainable farms and local produce markets of New England and Canada and even of Italy provide other views of a quiet but burgeoning revolution.

As Kingsolver makes clear, this was a family project from the get-go, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle reflects that communal spirit. Informative sidebars by biologist husband Steven L. Hopp offer, in his own words, "fifty-cent buckets of a dollar’s worth of goods" on many of the topics that Barbara touches upon in the narrative. Daughter Camille offers a nineteen-year-old’s perspective with short, reflective essays and a slew of tried-and-true family recipes for planning seasonal eating. Lily supplies the eggs, and a charming youthful willingness to chip in.

Part memoir and part investigative journalism, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is vintage Barbara Kingsolver – wry, candid, levelheaded, wise, humble, intelligent, rueful, and undeniably entertaining. Both timely and timeless, this absorbing book will surely be embraced as a manifesto for better living through a return to the things that should matter most – good food, a culture of family and community, and a sensible path to consuming our world’s resources.

The Bellwether Prize For Fiction
In Support of a Literature of Social Change

Established by Barbara Kingsolver

Hillary Jordan of Tivoli, New York, is the winner of the 2006 Bellwether Prize, for her novel Mudbound.

"I'm deeply honored by the faith Ms. Kingsolver has placed in me and in Mudbound," Jordan said, on learning she had won the prize. "I do believe literature can change the world for the better, and I can only hope Mudbound will have a small measure of that power."

Jordan was born in Dallas, Texas, and spent her childhood there and in Muskogee, Okla. After receiving her Bachelor of Arts degree from Wellesley College, she embarked on a career as an advertising copywriter. Twelve years and hundreds of commercials later, "I came to my senses and started writing fiction," she said. She has earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University and published short stories in literary magazines. Mudbound is her first novel. It will be published by Algonquin in Spring 2008.

Mudbound explores the lives of farmers and sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta in 1946, including veterans of "Eleanor Roosevelt’s Army," the corps of African American men who returned from service in World War II to face unaltered contempt in the Jim Crow south. "The story took me straight into another world," Kingsolver said. "The writing carries the moral authority and dedication to craft that I’ve hoped all along to reward with this project."

The Bellwether Prize is awarded biennially to an unpublished first novel. Previous prizes have been awarded to: Donna Gershten, 2000, Kissing the Virgin’s Mouth (HarperCollins, 2001); Gayle Brandeis, 2002, The Book of Dead Birds (HarperCollins, 2003); and Marjorie Kowalski Cole, 2004, Correcting the Landscape (HarperCollins, 2005).

Please check www.bellwetherprize.org for more information.

LAST STAND: AMERICAN'S VIRGIN LANDS - October 2002

In words and images, Barbara Kingsolver and award-winning photographer Annie Griffiths Belt celebrate America's remaining wilderness.

"In the places that call me out, I know I'll recover my wordless childhood trust in the largeness of life and its willingness to take me in." - Barbara Kingsolver

A Collection of Essays
SMALL WONDER - April 2002

"On my desk sits a small black and white portrait of the world in a new year, when the year was 1903, and words that have crossed a century to reach me: 'Out of the chaos the future emerges in harmony and beauty.' Promises and prayers contain their own kinds of answer, as consecrated aspiration. I need this one now…"

In her new essay collection, Barbara Kingsolver brings to us out of one of history's darker moments an extended love song to the world we still have. From its opening parable gleaned from recent news about a lost child saved in an astonishing way, the book moves on to consider a world of surprising and hopeful prospects ranging from an inventive conservation scheme in a remote jungle to the backyard flock of chickens tended by the author's small daughter.

Whether she is contemplating the Grand Canyon, her vegetable garden, motherhood, adolescence, genetic engineering, TV-watching, the history of civil rights, or the future of a nation founded on the best of all human impulses, these essays are grounded in the author's belief that our largest problems have grown from the earth's remotest corners as well as our own backyards, and that answers may lie in those places, too. In the voice Kingsolver's readers have come to rely on-- sometimes grave, occasionally hilarious, and ultimately persuasive--Small Wonder is a hopeful examination of the people we seem to be, and what we might yet make of ourselves.

Small Wonder is also available in unabridged, audio format read by the author. book info