“Something in the world links faces and leaves and rivers and woods and wind together and makes them a string of medallions with all our faces on them, worn forever round our necks, kin.”

Why is it great? Written long before every person carried a camera, before Facebook, back when “streaming” was just what water did as it coursed through its bed, Goyen, raised in a small town in East Texas, believed we could carry our stories and memories with us, wear them like leis and rosaries through whatever befell us.