In this collection of essays, the former director of the Bennington Writing Seminars and the coeditor of the journal Agni reflects on “the old questions, the good questions, the old Heideggerian questions that seem so very basic on the surface, but then you get caught in the implications and realize that they go on and on and that you’ll only go crazy trying to answer them.” Chief among Birkerts’s interrogations is what it means to be a writer today, when so many other mediums compete for an audience. Meditating on smartphones, photography, Jorge Luis Borges, Bob Dylan, and more, Birkerts offers writing— “the right words in the right order”—as a pathway through an increasingly complex labyrinth.