Nell Zink is a writer of extraordinary talent and range. Her work insistently raises the possibility that the world is larger and stranger than the world you think you know.

Family's the one thing you can't change. You can cover yourself with tattoos. You can get a grapefruit-sized ring going through your earlobe. You can change your name. You can move to a different continent. But you cannot change who your parents were, and who your siblings are, and who your children are.

I feel that working environmentalists are, in the main, happier than armchair environmentalists.

We may freak out globally, but we suffer locally.

...She felt that nothing could kill her hope now, nothing. She was seventy-five and she was going to make some changes in her life.

The more you pursue distractions, the less effective any particular distraction is, and so I'd had to up various dosages, until, before I knew it, I was checking my e-mail every ten minutes, and my plugs of tobacco were getting ever larger, and my two drinks a night had worsened to four, and I'd achieved such deep mastery of computer solitaire that my goal was no longer to win a game but to win two or more games in a row--a kind of meta-solitaire whose fascination consisted not in playing the cards but in surfing the streaks of wins and losses.

The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.