Name: The Face
ISBN: 9781632060525

Ruth Ozeki

What did your face look like before your parents were born? In The Face: A Time Code, bestselling author and Zen Buddhist priest Ruth Ozeki recounts, in moment-to-moment detail, a profound encounter with memory and the mirror. Ozeki challenges herself to spend three hours gazing into her own reflection, recording her thoughts and noticing every possible detail. Those solitary hours open up a lifetime's worth of meditations on race, aging, family, death, the body, self-doubt and, finally, acceptance. Ozeki paints an intimate and rich portrait of life as told through a face.

A Time Code

The Face

In Time Code of a Face, bestselling author Ruth Ozeki recounts, in moment-to-moment detail, a profound encounter with memory and the mirror. The author challenges herself to spend three hours staring into her own reflection, recording her thoughts, and noticing every possible detail. Those solitary hours open up a lifetime's worth of meditations on race, age, family, death, the body, self doubt and, finally, acceptance. In a lyrical essay suffused with her Zen Buddhist practice and thoroughly unlike anything in the author's celebrated novels, Ozeki shows us just how rich and intimate the terrain of one's own face can be. Praise for Ruth Ozeki “Ozeki is one of my favorite novelists....bewitching, intelligent, hilarious, and heartbreaking, often on the same page.” —Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of This Is How You Lose Her “Ozeki joins the constellation of such environmentally aware writers as Barbara Kingsolver, Annie Proulx, and Margaret Atwood.” —Chicago Tribune “A careful, considerate writer.” —Booklist Ruth Ozeki is a novelist, filmmaker, and Zen Buddhist priest. Her first two novels, My Year of Meats (1998) and All Over Creation (2003), have been translated into eleven languages and published in fourteen countries. Her most recent work, A Tale for the Time-Being (2013), won the LA Times book prize, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critic's Circle Award, and has been published in over thirty countries. Ruth's documentary and dramatic independent films, including Halving the Bones, have been shown on PBS, at the Sundance Film Festival, and at colleges and universities across the country. A longtime Buddhist practitioner, Ruth was ordained in 2010 and is affiliated with the Brooklyn Zen Center and the Everyday Zen Foundation. She lives in British Columbia and New York City, and is currently the Elizabeth Drew Professor of Creative Writing at Smith College.

Jeremy Wang

yay another hit from ruth! this time something personal essayish, with an interesting structure that bounces between timestamped reflections on her face (while staring at it for 3 hours???) and brief excursions into her life and family history. 

it was really beautiful to see and think about how much of this history is encoded in your face, and how tendrils reaching outward from the tiniest of details can touch on every aspect of your life.

The Face A Time Code

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