To open Of Memory and Margins is to step into a room that has been waiting for you — patient, lamplit, faintly humming with the day's last argument.

An issue from the Hudson archive — essays, verse, and review of the season's most necessary books.

The prose moves like weather. Sentences gather, break, gather again. What looks at first like restraint is, on closer reading, a kind of generosity — the writer trusting the reader to feel the storm without being shown the lightning.

The Weight of the Quotidian

The dialogue is doing several jobs at once. It tells us where we are. It tells us who is listening. And, more rarely, it tells us what the silence between two people actually costs.

“There is no false note here, only a writer working at the full reach of her instrument.”

The dialogue is doing several jobs at once. It tells us where we are. It tells us who is listening. And, more rarely, it tells us what the silence between two people actually costs.

There are passages in this book that ask to be read twice, not because they are difficult, but because the first reading is too occupied with surprise to register the music underneath.

The Weight of the Quotidian

Plot, in the conventional sense, is almost beside the point. What propels the pages is closer to attention — the writer's, then ours — turning over the ordinary until it gives up its odd, persistent light.

Whatever you were reading before Of Memory and Margins, set it down. Whatever you read after will be measured, fairly or not, against it.