Welcome to Litsy!

�Gutsy, funny, risky and wise, full of dazzling late-night insight, in-the-middle-of-everything epiphanies, moments of sheer honesty blooming into gut truths.� �Marlon James, Booker Prize�winning author Aminatta Forna is one of our most important literary voices, and her novels have won the Windham Campbell Prize and the Commonwealth Writers� Prize for Best Book. In this elegantly rendered and wide-ranging collection of new and previously published essays, Forna writes intimately about displacement, trauma and memory, love, and how we coexist and encroach on the non-human world. Movement is a constant here. In the title piece, �The Window Seat,� she reveals the unexpected enchantments of commercial air travel. In �Obama and the Renaissance Generation,� she documents how, despite the narrative of Obama�s exceptionalism, his father, like her own, was one of a generation of gifted young Africans who came to the United Kingdom and the United States for education and were expected to build their home countries anew after colonialism. In �The Last Vet,� time spent shadowing Dr. Jalloh, the only veterinarian in Sierra Leone, as he works with the street dogs of Freetown, becomes a meditation on what a society�s treatment of animals tells us about its principles. In �Crossroads,� she examines race in America from an African perspective, and in �Power Walking� she describes what it means to walk in the world in a Black woman�s body and in �The Watch� she explores the raptures of sleep and sleeplessness the world over. Deeply meditative and written with a wry humor, The Window Seat confirms that Forna is �a compelling essayist . . . her voice direct, lucid, and fearless� (Claire Messud, Harper�s Magazine).