John Steinbeck's East of Eden, with Michon Matthiesen

There is an old story we keep telling because we cannot stop living it. A brother brings his offering and it is received; another brings his and it is not; and in the space of that difference something curdles. We know how it goes. We have felt the heat rise in our own chests when someone else is favored, praised, chosen—when the good that lands on them seems, by some dark arithmetic, to be subtracted from us. Cain rises up against Abel in a field, and the first human death is not an accident...