Awards
- Short-listed for National Book Award 1997
- Short-listed for National Book Awards: Fiction 1997
- Shortlisted for National Book Awards: Fiction 1997.
- Winner of American Book Award 1998
Overview
""Every year I bury a couple hundred of my townspeople."" So opens this singular and wise testimony. Like all poets, inspired by death, Thomas Lynch is, unlike others, also hired to bury the dead or to cremate them and to tend to their families in a small Michigan town where he serves as the funeral director. In the conduct of these duties he has kept his eyes open, his ear tuned to the indispensable vernaculars of love and grief. In these twelve pieces his is the voice of both witness and functionary. Here, Lynch, poet to the dying, names the hurts and whispers the condolences and shapes the questions posed by this familiar mystery. So here is homage to parents who have died and to children who shouldn't have. Here are golfers tripping over grave markers, gourmands and hypochondriacs, lovers and suicides. These are the lessons for life our mortality teaches us.
Full Product Details
Author: Thomas Lynch
Publisher: WW Norton & Co
Imprint: WW Norton & Co
Dimensions:
Width: 12.70cm
, Height: 1.80cm
, Length: 19.80cm
Weight: 0.177kg
ISBN: 9780393334876
ISBN 10: 0393334872
Pages: 224
Publication Date: 22 June 2009
Audience:
General/trade
,
General
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: In Print
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Reviews
Lynch's vivid prose has the electricity of writing that tells us what is going on in the secret places of the community-and the secret places of the heart.
A startling and eloquent meditation on death and bereavement. A memoir that is stand-out superb. Forceful, authentic and full of a kind of ethical and aesthetic clarity. One of the most life-affirming books I have read ... brims with humanity, irreverence, and invigorating candor. Lynch's vivid prose has the electricity of writing that tells us what is going on in the secret places of the community-and the secret places of the heart.
A memoir that is stand-out superb. -- Esquire Forceful, authentic and full of a kind of ethical and aesthetic clarity. -- New York Times A startling and eloquent meditation on death and bereavement. -- Spin One of the most life-affirming books I have read ... brims with humanity, irreverence, and invigorating candor. -- The Nation Lynch's vivid prose has the electricity of writing that tells us what is going on in the secret places of the community-and the secret places of the heart. -- USA Today
Author Information
Thomas Lynch’s stories, poems, and essays have appeared in Granta, the Atlantic, Harper’s, the New York Times, and elsewhere. His first collection of essays, The Undertaking, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Lynch lives in Milford, Michigan.
