The Salt of the Universe

By: Amy Leach

Published by Picador USA, 2025-08-05

Named a Recommended Read by The New Yorker A book of mischief and improvisation that answers fundamentalism with rage, music, and delight in this earth. A book of mischief and improvisation, The Salt of the Universe answers fundamentalism of all kinds with rage, music, and delight. It asks questions that are urgent, impossible, necessary, and irresistible: Where does freedom live? Why does it sometimes feel so good to be told what to do? What on heaven and earth is the Apicklypse? These and other inquiries arise from Amy Leach’s experience: playing fiddle and piano (and sometimes the organ); her childhood in the Seventh-day Adventist Church, and its many prohibitions (coffee, dancing) and emphasis on the apocalypse. After listening to thousands of sermons from a variety of pulpits, here Leach is offering one of her own. She borrows the words of an old hymn, and says: “This is my story, this is my song.” Accompanied by four-year-old mystics and six-year-old geologists, bears and butterflies and willow trees, she praises not obedience but freedom, not secondhand but firsthand thoughts, not homogeneity but heterogeneity. She champions Emily Dickinson and Jesus over interfering prophets, questions over answers, the soul over the institution, Miles Davis over miles of marching. The Salt of the Universe argues against argument, and against restrictions of all kinds and their limiting effect on our humanity. In this whirlwind of linguistic cartwheels, philosophical shenanigans, and praise songs to the cosmos, Leach reminds us: we must run toward mischief, music, love, the wonders of nature, and the wild joys of all that we don’t yet know.