Wickerby

Against the backdrop of a tumbledown Brooklyn neighborhood, Charles Siebert, a native Brooklynite and longtime city-dweller, reflects upon the five months he has just spent at Wickerby, an old, collapsing log cabin in the woods of Canada. In vivid, lyrical prose, Siebert relates the events that prompted his sudden departure to Wickerby, and, while recounting the details of his isolated existence there, arrives at a series of original insights that explore and often explode the classic Romantic distinctions between city and country, man-made and natural. Along the way, the book's episodic,…