A few months after the death of the neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks in 2015, I visited his office in midtown Manhattan to pass on my condolences to his friend and longtime editor Kate Edgar. Shelves were stacked with editions of every translation of Sacks’s books; piled on every surface were reams of yellow paper covered in Sacks’s barely legible scrawl. The subjects were as eclectic as his enthusiasms: two towering piles were marked “Dreams” and “Memory”, and another was marked “Borges”. There was more than enough material for at least two more books of essays, Edgar told me (The River of Consciousness would be published in 2017, and Everything in Its Place in 2019), and then, gesturing to some of the piles around her, intimated the scale of another task: sorting through 70 large boxes of correspondence.
From the riches of those boxes, Edgar has now distilled 700 pages of absorbing, illuminating, moving and entertaining letters for publication. They range from August 1960 (when Sacks first moved from England to North America), through to a few days before his death in New York, from melanoma, 55 years later.
