A collection of fourteen essays — about light, distance, restraint, and the slow making of a life.
It is the light, I think, that we are all secretly chasing. The light that has been earned by the room. Not the photographic light of a magazine spread, where the curtains have been moved and the flowers have been arranged and the dog has been fed and removed to a different room. Not the late-evening light of a hotel suite in a city that we will never come back to. But the quieter, slower light that arrives, on certain afternoons in certain weeks of certain years, in a room where the curtains have hung in the same place for nine years, where the dog has been fed in the same corner for six, where the flowers come from the same garden, where nothing, on this particular afternoon, has been rearranged.
The light, in such a room, has a habit. It has memorized the position of the small table at the window. It has memorized the height of the bookcase. It has memorized the precise hour of the afternoon at which the corner of the wall begins to glow, in a way that the wall does not glow at any other hour. The room and the light have come to an arrangement.
Park is, sentence for sentence, one of the two or three essayists I most look forward to opening when an envelope arrives. The Quiet Things is her best book.
Reading Eleni Park is like having a conversation, in low light, with the friend whose attention you have always wanted. This book is essential.
Park does what only the best essayists can: she makes the small thing matter without ever raising her voice. A quiet, exact, important book.
Pre-orders ship the morning of release · signed first-edition bookplate included from the publisher