It’s unclear what to call Annie Dillard, where to shelve her. Over more than 40 years, she has been, sometimes all at once, a poet, essayist, novelist, humorist, naturalist, critic, theologian, collagist and full-throated singer of mystic incantations. Instead of being any particular kind of writer, she is, flagrantly, a consciousness — an abstract, all-encompassing energy field that inhabits a given piece of writing the way sunlight clings to a rock: delicately but with absolute force, always leaving a shadow behind. This is an essential part of what it means to be human, this shifting between the transcendent self and the contingent world, the ecstasy and the dental bill. We all do some version of it, all the time. But Dillard does it more insistently. This month, she publishes ‘‘The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New,’’ a collection of pieces that spans her entire variegated career.

Dillard began publishing books in 1974. ‘‘Tickets for a Prayer Wheel,’’ a small collection of poems, was followed immediately by ‘‘Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,’’ a long nonfictional account of her experience embedding, Thoreau-style, for a year of close observation of the titular waterway in Virginia. ‘‘Pilgrim’’ won the Pulitzer Prize and unleashed upon the world Dillard’s radical style: prose right on the border of poetry, dense with dazzling effects — strong metaphors, heavy rhythms, bold verbs, sudden parables, outlandish facts harvested from the darkest corners of the library. From the start, this has been Dillard’s mission: to crowbar surprise, sentence by sentence, into all the tiny gaps of our ordinary experience. ‘‘Water turtles smooth as beans were gliding down the current in a series of easy, weightless push-offs as men bound on the moon,’’ she writes in ‘‘Pilgrim.’’ A pile of burned books ‘‘flaked in my hand like pieces of pie.’’ In Dillard’s writing, strange things are constantly becoming familiar, and vice versa. (‘‘Like mushrooms and engines, they didn’t have hands,’’ she writes of nuns.) Above all, Dillard refuses to fall into traditional expository rhythms, to calm down, to be normal, to proceed with caution. She feels driven, always, to summon revelations out of nothing — to ‘‘call for fireworks, with only a ballpoint pen.’’

You will find, in the following pages, a small but rare bloom of Annie Dillard’s fireworks: three early essays, all short and characteristically strange, all appearing for the first time in this form. They have been revised multiple times over multiple decades, because Dillard is always revising, and then re-revising. When your project is to articulate all the intricately nested subtleties of a human mind in contact with the ever-changing world, your work, by definition, will never stop.

Two of these essays (‘‘Recalling Niels Bohr’’ and ‘‘Lonesome, With Snails’’) revolve around jokes — a favorite subject of Dillard’s. In one, the joke is that a fireplace, paradoxically, cools a room. In the other, a snail is described, absurdly, as ‘‘short.’’ That’s it. Those are the jokes. They are not, by normal joke-telling standards, particularly good; they are run-of-the-mill, everyday, lukewarm witticisms. But such everydayness serves Dillard’s purposes exactly. We don’t need great writing to tell us that obviously amazing things are amazing, just as we don’t need high-powered telescopes to tell us that the sun is warm. What we need from great writing, most urgently, is an understanding that the mundane itself — snails, fireplaces, shrubs, pebbles, socks, minor witticisms — is secretly amazing.