A groundbreaking new series from Restless Books: In original essays, a diverse group of writers will take readers on a guided tour of that most intimate terrain: their own faces.

Our inspiration for The Face comes from a passage by Jorge Luis Borges: “As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.” What stories does a face tell?A face accumulates signs of wear and betrays our habits of living. Above all, our faces are our most distinctive signatures; flesh-and-blood emblems of the identities we carry around invisibly.

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 11 languages and published in 14 countries. Her most recent work, A Tale for the Time-Being (2013), was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and will be 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 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.

• My Year of Meats
• History of the Rain: Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2014
• All Over Creation
• Orfeo
• Butterflies in November