"A stunning exploration of happiness and memory. These brilliant, beautiful essays challenged and delighted me. A transcendent debut." –Brit Bennett
"Mairead Small Staid is an exceptionally delightful critic, with a lavish, forceful intellect and a style marked by cross-disciplinary ignition and pointillistic grace. In The Traces, which is the kind of book that'll be passed around like a good secret, she pursues happiness as a magic aberration, a subject as fraught and consequential as its well-trod opposite. Immortalizing one golden season in Florence, she captures the flux of her own personhood and potential–and ours, too–under the influence of time, art, weather, love, and chance." –Jia Tolentino
