What do you recommend?

“I am re-reading Katy Simpson Smith’s brilliant novel Free Men. Katy is a scholar of the colonial south and spins the most beguiling fiction from the facts of another time.

There are moments she describes with such emotional acuity and beauty I cannot shake them. For example: ‘So maybe love never passes on, maybe it just covers itself over, curls into a seed, waits. With her gone, all the strong feelings in me were sleeping.’ ”

Bill Clegg, author of Did You Ever Have a Family, now out in paperback

This story was originally published May 20, 2016 at 3:51 PM with the headline "What do you recommend?."