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In lyric essays, a story, poems, and photographs, Smith illuminates the whirl of chance and choice that stokes a writer's imagination, recounting her fascination on the eve of a trip to Paris with Simone Weil and an evocative, accidentally discovered film about Stalin's mass deportation of Estonians. In France, a gravestone, a televised figure-skating competition, a meal, and a garden all converge in what becomes Devotion, ... fairy tale about a young, displaced Estonian skater and a solitary dealer in rare objects and arms. This... fable about creativity and obsession, possession and freedom is followed by a meditation on how a work of art is, for other artists, a call to action.