The Overstory: Winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

There are a hundred thousand species of love, separately invented, each more ingenious than the last, and every one of them keeps making things.

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

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.

Long ago her father taught her an old formula, one that converts cricket chirps per minute into degrees Fahrenheit.

There it is: the ultimate commandment. Take care of your own. Protect your genes. Lay down your life for one child, two siblings, or eight first cousins. How many friends would that translate to? How many strangers who might still be out there, laying down their lives for other species? How many trees? He can’t begin to tell his wife the worst of i

No one sees trees. We see fruit, we see nuts, we see wood, we see shade. We see ornaments or pretty fall foliage. Obstacles blocking the road or wrecking the ski slope. Dark, threatening places that must be cleared. We see branches about to crush our roof. We see a cash crop. But trees—trees are invisible.

“Billions of years ago, a single, fluke, self-copying cell learned how to turn a barren ball of poison gas and volcanic slag into this peopled garden. And everything you hope, fear, and love became possible.”

Enlightenment is a shared enterprise.

Adam twists around to look through the rear window. There, as he watches, the whole tree bares. It falls from one moment to the next, the most synchronized drop of leaves that nature ever engineered. A gust of air, some last fluttered objection, and all the veined fans let go at once, releasing a flock of golden telegrams down West Fourth Street.