The Overstory: Winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

To be human is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one, and to mistake life for something huge with two legs. No: life is mobilized on a vastly larger scale, and the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people. But

The Greeks had a word, xenia—guest friendship—a command to take care of traveling strangers, to open your door to whoever is out there, because anyone passing by, far from home, might be God.

Love is a tree with branches in forever with roots in eternity and a trunk nowhere at all

the English first swarmed a continent that rose from the ocean overnight, seeking masts for their leviathan frigates and ships of the line, masts that no place in all stripped Europe, not even the farthest boreal north, could any longer provide.

We’re cashing in a billion years of planetary savings bonds and blowing it on assorted bling.

Every piece of earth needs a new way to grip it. There are more ways to branch than any cedar pencil will ever find. A thing can travel everywhere, just by holding still.

Love, as all the good novels know, is a question of title, deed, and possession.

“We’ve been trying to tell you that since 1492.”

What did the dead Joan of Arc hear? Insight or delusion? Next week he’ll tell his undergrads about Durkheim, Foucault, crypto-normativity: How reason is just another weapon of control. How the invention of the reasonable, the acceptable, the sane, even the human, is greener and more recent than humans suspect.