image of person or book cover 4018863729464465590.jpg
Image courtesy of publisher's website.
Issue Details: First known date: 2021... 2021 Signs and Wonders : Dispatches from a Time of Beauty and Loss
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'The celebrated, Walkley Award-winning author on how global warming is changing not only our climate but our culture. Beautifully observed, brilliantly argued and deeply felt, these essays show that our emotions, our art, our relationships with the generations around us – all the delicate networks that make us who we are – have already been transformed.

'In Signs and Wonders, Falconer explores how it feels to live as a reader, a writer, a lover of nature and a mother of small children in an era of profound ecological change.

'Building on Falconer’s two acclaimed essays, ‘Signs and Wonders’ and the Walkley Award-winning ‘The Opposite of Glamour’, Signs and Wonders is a pioneering examination of how we are changing our culture, language and imaginations along with our climate. Is a mammoth emerging from the permafrost beautiful or terrifying? How is our imagination affected when something that used to be ordinary – like a car windscreen smeared with insects – becomes unimaginable? What can the disappearance of the paragraph from much contemporary writing tell us about what’s happening in the modern mind?

'Scientists write about a 'great acceleration' in human impact on the natural world. Signs and Wonders shows that we are also in a period of profound cultural acceleration, which is just as dynamic, strange, extreme and, sometimes, beautiful. Ranging from an ‘unnatural’ history of coal to the effect of a large fur seal turning up in the park below her apartment, this book is a searching and poetic examination of the ways we are thinking about how, and why, to live now.' (Publication summary)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

    • Cammeray, Cremorne - Mosman - Northbridge area, Sydney Northeastern Suburbs, Sydney, New South Wales,: Simon and Schuster Australia , 2021 .
      image of person or book cover 4018863729464465590.jpg
      Image courtesy of publisher's website.
      Extent: 288p.
      Note/s:
      • Published 29 September 2021

      ISBN: 9781760857820

Other Formats

Works about this Work

Uncertain Futures : Climate Fiction in Australian Literature Jessica White , 2023 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Cambridge History of the Australian Novel 2023;
Lost Weather Louis Klee , 2022 single work review
— Appears in: Imaginative Possession: Learning to Live in the Antipodes , February 2022;

— Review of Signs and Wonders : Dispatches from a Time of Beauty and Loss Delia Falconer , 2021 selected work essay
Book Review: Signs and Wonders, Delia Falconer Brooke Dunnell , 2021 single work review
— Appears in: ArtsHub , November 2021;

— Review of Signs and Wonders : Dispatches from a Time of Beauty and Loss Delia Falconer , 2021 selected work essay
What’s My Anthropocene? A Review of Signs and Wonders Michael Winkler , 2021 single work review
— Appears in: Overland [Online] , November 2021;

— Review of Signs and Wonders : Dispatches from a Time of Beauty and Loss Delia Falconer , 2021 selected work essay
Distilling the Signs of the Times Jack Cameron Stanton , 2021 single work review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 16 October 2021; (p. 13)

— Review of Signs and Wonders : Dispatches from a Time of Beauty and Loss Delia Falconer , 2021 selected work essay
Signs and Wonders, Delia Falconer Maria Takolander , 2021 single work review
— Appears in: The Saturday Paper , 2-8 October 2021;

— Review of Signs and Wonders : Dispatches from a Time of Beauty and Loss Delia Falconer , 2021 selected work essay

'The essay, if you haven’t noticed, is having a moment. It’s as if, in the age of the Anthropocene, as we face the end of the world as we know it, reality has finally become too real for make-believe. Delia Falconer’s Signs and Wonders is a collection of essays on subjects as diverse as gum trees and the decline of the paragraph, but its overriding imperative is to confront the reality of climate change. Exactly how it is to be confronted is a problem we all face. Falconer’s essays aim for a sophisticated mixture of reportage and philosophy, with healthy doses of outrage and despair.' (Introduction)

Apocalypse Now : Delia Falconer’s New Essay Collection on Climate and Culture Jonica Newby , 2021 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , November no. 437 2021; (p. 43-44)

— Review of Signs and Wonders : Dispatches from a Time of Beauty and Loss Delia Falconer , 2021 selected work essay

'Reading Richard Flanagan’s searing allegory The Living Sea of Waking Dreams (2020) and Delia Falconer’s new non-fiction book, Signs and Wonders: Dispatches from a time of beauty and loss, in rapid succession was a surreal, slightly unmooring experience. Both authors lucidly capture the dreamlike state of disbelief and horrified fury with which we’ve watched the world slide terribly into the 2020s. Both are part of an outpouring of new language, new stories, new ways of expressing our reactions to the barely imaginable scale of realities we can no longer ignore: fire columns that remind NASA of dragons; a pandemic that conjures news scenes we had thought the province of cinema. As our poor human cognition struggles to catch up, scientists become poets, novelists become scientists.' (Introduction)

Distilling the Signs of the Times Jack Cameron Stanton , 2021 single work review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 16 October 2021; (p. 13)

— Review of Signs and Wonders : Dispatches from a Time of Beauty and Loss Delia Falconer , 2021 selected work essay
What’s My Anthropocene? A Review of Signs and Wonders Michael Winkler , 2021 single work review
— Appears in: Overland [Online] , November 2021;

— Review of Signs and Wonders : Dispatches from a Time of Beauty and Loss Delia Falconer , 2021 selected work essay
Lost Weather Louis Klee , 2022 single work review
— Appears in: Imaginative Possession: Learning to Live in the Antipodes , February 2022;

— Review of Signs and Wonders : Dispatches from a Time of Beauty and Loss Delia Falconer , 2021 selected work essay
Uncertain Futures : Climate Fiction in Australian Literature Jessica White , 2023 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Cambridge History of the Australian Novel 2023;
Last amended 14 Jun 2022 09:53:52
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