A woman learns an alien language that enables her to see her future. A man endures the death of his wife at an angel's hands, but must learn to love God in order to be reunited with her in the afterlife. Students on a college campus make a political statement by disabling their ability to recognize beauty. Combining scientific curiosity and narrative intricacy, Ted Chiang's award-winning collection explores the boundaries between reason and faith, between determinism and our ability to choose, between words and the concepts we try to describe with them.