From the author of A Geometry of Lilies comes a new collection of essays focusing on the exotic in the ordinary of everyday life. Steven Harvey's words illuminate and entertain as he ruminates on such topics as love of family, of students and teaching, of place and tradition, and of how language itself can transform experience.

Separate as the essays are, they all tell the same story, and though they bear different titles, they all could be called "Lost in Translation." In each essay, the self is brought against a new world or two worlds into conflict, the soul shedding a husk of its former life in the encounter. Such losses, the essays say, are the leavings of our changes and the price we pay for becoming. Some part of our true selves, Harvey notes, finds voice only in such translations—in engagement with others on others' terms—and this is the part we cannot live without.