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The Barnes & Noble Holiday Gift Guide Find the Perfect Gift | Shop Now The Barnes & Noble Holiday Gift Guide Find the Perfect Gift | Shop Now
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A novel of thirty self-contained, stylistically innovative chapters, all of them responding in their own way to the titular question, and all of them written with a power and ingenuity reminiscient of Virginia Woolf and Thomas Bernhard.

"We feel pain, says Fritz, because we need to feel pain, it saves us from being burnt, or hurt, or from walking blindly into danger, breaking a bone; but what does a sense of beauty save us from; what purpose is there in our being coruscated by passing ugline...