“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.”

—William Goyen, "House of Breath," 1950

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.