The Age of Loneliness: Essays

"Marris combines personal and natural history to potent effect, and the elegiac prose renders palpable the distance that modernity has placed between humans and the environment. Readers will be awed." --Publishers Weekly, starred review

"A satisfyingly complex and profound collection."--Kirkus Reviews

"Astonishing . . . With equal parts research and reflection, these essays transpose landscapes of personal and shared loss to show how absence can be an opportunity for connection--both to a place and to the people who define and witness it." --Elaina Friedman, Chicago Review of Books

"An undeniably profound elucidation of losses. . . . [Marris's] approach counters the colonial, the destructive, the industrial. The Age of Loneliness holds up a reflection whereby we, too, grieve the sometimes invisible losses that we have been bequeathed." --Anita Felicelli, Los Angeles Times

"[Marris] has given us a model of expression, inquiry and attitude to begin to resist the normalization of our lonely disconnection from what has left and what is leaving."--Ron Slate, On the Seawall

"These are essays of exquisite beauty. The Age of Loneliness is an exploration of landscapes, interior and exterior, and the ways they become imprinted with both wounding and healing. As Marris reckons with the loneliness of late capitalism, what emerges is a work of love and connection."--Kathryn Savage

"In The Age of Loneliness, Laura Marris guides readers through specific ecological histories of absence-making: displacement, climate crisis, and the vanishing of species. 'The more a creature can tolerate, the more likely she is to end up alone in an increasingly hostile world, ' she observes of herself and of the wildlife around her. Marris' critique succeeds through its specifically dystopian details: horseshoe crabs decimated for fertilizer, birds pulverized by airplanes, 'words from the living world' dropped from The Oxford Junior Dictionary in favor of 'database, ' 'broadband, ' 'committee.' This thoroughly researched, passionate, and courageous autobiographical nonfiction debut also reminds us that even in Western New York State's long history of toxicity, even in Buffalo-Niagara's now-desolate Love Canal, we remain connected by quiet ecosystems of companionship and love."--Susan Howe

"The Age of Loneliness is a stunning book that will become a close friend, and like all good friends, it will change the shape of our world. Both personal and planetary, roving in its intelligence and deeply rooted in its lyrical observation, Laura Marris has managed that trickiest of feats: she brings the past into the present and reminds us that we're not yet alone. With prose that calls to mind the best in the tradition of nature writing, but with a voice which is also clearly, distinctly its own, Marris is the writer for our time." --Daegan Miller

"The Age of Loneliness is a gorgeous, poignant guide to finding one another in a time of loss."--Michelle Nijhuis, author of Beloved Beasts

"The Age of Loneliness calls to us from our era of extinction like a bird we thought we had lost. Laura Marris is a prophet whose patient song calls us to attention, to mercy, and finally, to each other."--Tomás Q. Morín