A few weeks ago, I finally watched the film Three Thousand Years of Longing and afterward rereadthe source, A.S. Byatt’s The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye. When I first encountered this book, I didn’t fall as wildly in love with it as I had with her Little Black Book of Stories, didn’t at that point sink into the density and delicious meandering of the mostly long stories in this volume, how they nourish and challenge the reader, the questions they raise. The title story/novella is about beauty and mortality, our relationship to art and storytelling, and how we try to make our lives meaningful.