Portraits of the American Landscape by 20 Contemporary Writers

A fresh, indelible portrait of America as it appears to our most gifted contemporary writers.

For more than 200 years artists and writers have sought to capture not just America's face but also her polymorphous spirit, as it is embodied in the land itself. These portraits about places in our country's diverse landscape range from the hummingbirds of Montana to the neon lights of Times Square, the brush fires of Alaska to the Grand Canyon's silent grandeur. They share a common desire: to explore both the sensual and the spiritual connections we have to places and the creativity they inspire.

Harry Crews, Joy Williams, Alan Lightman, Kathleen Norris, Bradford Morrow, Phillip Lopate, Gerald Early, Diane Ackerman, Scott Russell Sanders, and many others take us to places as they appear not through the camera lens of a traveler, but to the artist's inner eye. Finally, NASA astronaut Jeffrey Hoffman lifts us up above America into space, where he looks down upon the country in all its vast and yet poignantly fragile entirety. Taken together, The Place Within is a time capsule in words, by some of our most distinguished writers.

Jodi Daynard's essays and other writings have appeared in numerous periodicals, including the New York Times Book Review, the Village Voice, Harvard Magazine, Harvard Review, Paris Review, and in several anthologies.

A love affair tests a new nation's revolutionary ideals. In 1770s Boston, a prosperous merchant's daughter, Eliza Boylston, lives a charmed life-until war breaches the walls of the family estate and forces her to live in a world in which wealth can no longer protect her. As the chaos of the Revolutionary War tears her family apart, Eliza finds herself drawn to her uncle's slave, John Watkins. Their love leads to her exile in Braintree, Massachusetts, home to radicals John and Abigail Adams and Eliza's midwife sister-in-law, Lizzie Boylston. But even as the uprising takes hold, Eliza can't help but wonder whether a rebel victory will grant her and John the most basic of American rights.