The Overstory: A Novel

That’s the job of consciousness, to turn Now into Always, to mistake what is for what was meant to be. Some days it feels like he and the rest of the Valley of Heart’s Delight didn’t invent online life, but just cut a clearing into it.

No mates exist for countless miles around, and a chestnut, though both male and female, will not serve itself.

She sighs long and slides down into the way things need to be. “It’s good to be cooked for.”

“You live between three trees. One is behind you. The Lote—the tree of life for your Persian ancestors. The tree at the boundary of the seventh heaven, that none may pass.

The day is one of those eerie Central Peninsula imitations of heaven—seventy degrees and clear, the air thick with bay laurel and eucalyptus.

There are only ancient prophecies that scry the seeds of time and say which will grow and which will not.

about an overpowered victory strategy players are calling Enlightenment.

Every one imagines that fear and anger, violence and desire, rage laced with the surprise capacity to forgive—character—is all that matters in the end.

a path she walks almost nightly, out and back like that old palindrome: La ruta nos aportó otro paso natural.