Read By: Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell on his selection: This essay is a marvel. From the tiniest, the most banal drama—a writer is distracted from her book by the fluttering of a moth at the window—Virginia Woolf distills one of the most penetrating explorations I know of the eternal questions: What does it mean to live? What does it mean to die? Woolf’s sentences are glorious, ostentatious, baroque, austere. How can an essay on death be finally so profound and joyful an affirmation of life? The essay is three or four pages long. It's one of the grandest things I know in literature. Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0