Synopses & Reviews
From the best-selling
How We Die by Sherwin Nuland to our fascination with serial murders, from the AIDS epidemic to the concerns of our aging population, America continues to express a widespread curiosity about death and dying. In
The Grim Reader, editors Maura Spiegel and Richard Tristman have gathered the best of the new writings on the subject of death along with classic statements on mortality to produce an essential resource for the heart and mind.
Historians tell us that death was once a public experience, circumscribed by religious ceremony, that gradually disappeared as our medical ability to forestall it grew more confident. This clinical capacity to mediate death-to postpone it with machines, to relieve its pain and suffering-has made it once more a public subject. Though death remains inevitable, denial, taboo, and shame have been banished in favor of reflection, candor, mutual aid, and acceptance. In their personal reckonings with death, these writers and thinkers wrestle with the indomitable fact, discover emotional insights and methods of coping unknown to them before the crisis of terminal illness. And in poems, eulogies, private expressions of love and loss, letters of condolences, we find inspiration and solace.
From the reflections of Grace Paley on the death of her mother to Jessica Mitford's sociology of American funeral customs, from Freud's musing on the transience of life to Milan Kundera's story of laughter at a funeral, The Grim Reader offers a fresh and unmediated encounter with mortality and its many dimensions."
Synopsis
The best classic and contemporary writing on mortality--from Montaigne to Monty Python--to produce an essential resource for the heart and mind.
The fear of death, the pain of bereavement, the art of consolation, and the custom of mourning--these are experiences with which all mortals must reckon. In
The Grim Reader, idiosyncratic and always enlightening pieces are grouped into thematic parts in which a diversity of perspective on death are revealed. From death in its most personal sphere to the major issues of death in the public realm,
The Grim Reader offers a fresh and unmediated encounter with mortality and the many dimensions of grief and recovery.
A compelling collection of poems, fiction, letters, historical documents, essays, and narrations from a wide variety of writers, including:
Vladimir Nabokov - John Ashbery - Samuel Beckett
Adam Smith - Simone de Beauvoir - Grace Paley
Giovanni Boccaccio - Bertolt Brecht - Roland Barthes
James Baldwin - Primo Levi - Anne Sexton
Luis Bu uel - Paul Monette - Jessica Mitford - Stanley Elkin
Synopsis
A compelling anthology of poems, letters, historical documents, essays, and fiction on the emotions, experiences, and rituals that accompany death and dying.
Synopsis
The fear of death, the pain of bereavement, the art of consolation, and the custom of mourning—these are experiences with which all mortals must reckon. In
The Grim Reader, editors Maura Spiegel and Richard Tristman have gathered the best classic and contemporary writing on mortality—from Montaigne to Monty Python—to produce an essential resource for the heart and mind. These idiosyncratic and always enlightening pieces are grouped into thematic parts in which a diversity of perspective on death are revealed. From death in its most personal sphere to the major issues of death in the public realm,
The Grim Reader offers a fresh and unmediated encounter with mortality and the many dimensions of grief and recovery.
A compelling collection of poems, fiction, letters, historical documents, essays, and narrations from a wide variety of writers, including:
Vladimir Nabokov- John Ashbery- Samuel Beckett
Adam Smith- Simone de Beauvoir- Grace Paley
Giovanni Boccaccio- Bertolt Brecht- Roland Barthes
James Baldwin- Primo Levi- Anne Sexton
Luis Buñuel- Paul Monette- Jessica Mitford- Stanley Elkin
About the Author
About the Editors
Maura Spiegel teaches at Columbia University and Barnard College. She has recently completed a book on the history of emotions in the nineteenth century.
Richard Tristman was a professor of literature for twenty-eight years. He is a contributor to The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, and is now writing a book on the idea of indecency.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments Preface
PART 1: RECKONINGS
WRESTLING WITH THE FACT
Sigmund Freud: On Transience
Bertolt Brecht: On His Mortality
Michel de Montaigne: To Philosophize Is to Learn to Die
Thomas Nagel: Death
C. P. Cavafy: The Horses of Achilles
Vladimir Nabokov: Speak, Memory
BEING BRAVE AND BEING SCARED
Philip Larkin: Aubade
Paul Zweig: Departures
John Keats: Sonnet
Marguerite Yourcenar: With Open Eyes
Adam Smith: On the Death of David Hume
William Hazlitt: On the Fear of Death
John Ashbery: Fear of Death
Robert Louis Stevenson: Aes Triplex
TIME TO BE OLD
A. R. Ammons: from Garbage
Samuel Clemens: On Old Age
Luis Buñuel: Swan Song
Kingsley Amis: Lovely
Philip Larkin: The Old Fools
PART 2: WHAT WORDS ARE THERE?
LEFT BEHIND
Paul Auster: Portrait of an Invisible Man
Donald Justice: Sonnet to My Father
Colette: He Died in His Seventy-Fourth Year . . .
Alvin Feinman: True Night
Emily Dickinson: Poems and a Letter
Sharon Olds: The Death of Marilyn Monroe 129
ONE FIGHT MORE
Sir Thomas Browne: Religio Medici
James Merrill: An Upward Look
Simone de Beauvoir: A Very Easy Death
Nicole Loraux: A Woman’s Suicide for a Man’s Death
SONS AND DAUGHTERS
Grace Paley: Mother
James Baldwin: Notes of a Native Son
Philip Roth: Patrimony
Anne Sexton: The Child-Bearers
Elizabeth Rosen: My Mother’s Death
PART 3: GIVE DEATH THE CROWN: WAR, PESTILENCE, GENOCIDE
IN ITS MIDST
Jasper Griffin: On Epic Death
Alan Moorehead: Gallipoli
Giovanni Boccaccio: The Plague in Florence
Samuel Pepys: The Plague in London
Primo Levi: October 1944
Robert Jay Lifton: Immersion in Death
OUR PLAGUE: AIDS
Emmanuel Dreuilhe: Mortal Embrace
Thom Gunn: Terminal
Paul Monette: 3275
PART 4: MAKING ARRANGEMENTS
THE ‘‘FORMAL FEELING’’: RITES AND RITUAL
Emily Vermeule: A Very Active Dead
Geoffrey Gorer: Death, Grief, and Mourning in Contemporary Britain
Sheila Awooner-Renner: I Desperately Needed to See My Son
George Bernard Shaw: On the Cremation of His Mother
Richard Selzer: Remains
DEATH CULTURES
Philippe Ariès: The Modern Cemetery
Jessica Mitford: The American Way of Death
Rudolf Schäfer: Photographing the Dead
Roland Barthes: Camera Lucida
Siegfried Giedion: The Mechanization of Death
Erwin Panofsky: The Dangerous Dead
LEGACIES
E. A. J. Honigmann: The Second-Best Bed
Carlos M. N. Eire: From Madrid to Purgatory
PART 5: DEATH ISSUES
FINAL CARE
George Orwell: How the Poor Die
Anne Munley: The Hospice Alternative
Joseph A. Califano: Death Management
EUTHANASIA AND ASSISTED SUICIDE
Timothy Quill: The Burdens of Aggressive Medical Treatment
Ronald Dworkin: Life’s Dominion
Michael Burleigh: ‘‘Euthanasia’’ in Germany
PART 6: A HEALTHY DISTANCE
Samuel Beckett: Malone Dies
Stanley Elkin: The Beginning of the (Living) End
Monty Python: The Dead Parrot
Milan Kundera: Graveside Laughter
PART 7: RECAPITULATION
William Shakespeare: Hamlet: The Graveyard