Via the British Library’s Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts.
This article is adapted from this year’s acceptance speech for the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, awarded by the National Book Critics Circle.
It’s such an honor to receive an award named for Nona Balakian, a real dynamo among book review editors, on such a list of nominees, and in such a
year. 2020 struck awe into the hearts of men. A new plague took almost 600,000 Americans, and we saw their end-of-life iPads waiting for them on tripods. When police took Black American lives, and we saw that on camera too, it seemed like the whole world stepped outside in solidarity and anger.