Delights

Ross Gay, the author of The Book of Delights and Inciting Joy, returns with another gathering of small everyday marvels. Like its predecessors, this collection was written over the course of a single year, and it continues his ongoing attempt to understand what delights us. For Gay, delight is bound up with connection and with whatever gives our lives meaning. He finds it in a half-remembered song drifting out of a passing car, in his stubborn refusal to order from a QR code menu, and in the small dog he unexpectedly grew fond of.

Family runs through these pieces as well. Gay writes about his mother baking a dozen varieties of cookies for her grandchildren, a scene that shows how care and pleasure move between generations.

The natural world takes up much of the book. Gay describes harvesting sweet potatoes, a hummingbird feeding among the beebalm, and a sunflower pushing up through a wall around a cemetery. He also writes about the fruit a neighbor's fig tree yields and the way it is shared with others. Throughout, he treats the earth as a source of endless and mysterious pleasure.

Readers who already follow Gay will find the same attentive, personal voice here, and readers of Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Zadie Smith, and Rebecca Solnit are likely to feel at home with it too. The book is meant to be read slowly and passed along to friends.