Among all of spring’s emergent beauty here in Sewanee, I cannot give myself over completely to the sight of the larkspur’s purple flowers without associating it with bruises.

Of course it’s the ankle of the horse that’s holy. What bends and bears weight. What’s tough, but vulnerable. And, of course, the horse’s fate matters more than the jockey’s, the latter’s pain merely a cause in a string of conditionals, sufficient if not necessary, for it’s the horse and only the horse who must pursue this brief and endless beauty, who must break with it.

What a terrible predicament: to not know if love is conditional and yet to understand that the only way to find out is to risk losing it. I don’t know where everyone who takes that risk finds their faith, but I know where I have found it: first on the page, where I test those early words, groping for a way to say what I have tried to hide and hide from.

Clarissa Dalloway is privileged and bourgeois and her hunt for flowers is an arguably frivolous quest. And yet, because we understand Clarissa, we appreciate the importance of the dinner party. A bouquet of flowers becomes noble as a grail.

Koh’s attention to language is an invitation to understand how she’s approaching the work ahead, preparing me as a reader for its twists and discoveries so that I might also begin to grasp the attendant challenges, humor, grief, and joy of translation—and of connection.

I’m not aware of any constraints when I write; my experience is of running full speed into darkness, yelling the words of the story as they mysteriously emerge from somewhere deep inside.

Will we look back on these past few months, and these first weeks of the new year, as the beginning of the end, the season when the pandemic lurched toward endemic? Or does no such final wave exist?

Everybody’s waiting for the man with the bag. This year, it’s full of books! Our staff picked a few we think readers should hold out for this holiday.

I knew she felt the planet’s changes in her blood, but as witnessed through a landscape she’d tracked for decades.