Download or read book The Obituary Writer A Novel written by Ann Hood and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2013-03-04 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sophisticated and suspenseful novel about the poignant lives of two women living in different eras. On the day John F. Kennedy is inaugurated, Claire, an uncompromising young wife and mother obsessed with the glamour of Jackie O, struggles over the decision of whether to stay in a loveless marriage or follow the man she loves and whose baby she may be carrying. Decades earlier, in 1919, Vivien Lowe, an obituary writer, is searching for her lover who disappeared in the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906. By telling the stories of the dead, Vivien not only helps others cope with their grief but also begins to understand the devastation of her own terrible loss. The surprising connection between Claire and Vivien will change the life of one of them in unexpected and extraordinary ways. Part literary mystery and part love story, The Obituary Writer examines expectations of marriage and love, the roles of wives and mothers, and the emotions of grief, regret, and hope.
Download or read book Find the Good written by Heather Lende and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2015-04-28 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the obituary writer in a spectacularly beautiful but often dangerous spit of land in Alaska, Heather Lende knows something about last words and lives well lived. Now she’s distilled what she’s learned about how to live a more exhilarating and meaningful life into three words: find the good. It’s that simple--and that hard. Quirky and profound, individual and universal, Find the Good offers up short chapters that help us unlearn the habit--and it is a habit--of seeing only the negatives. Lende reminds us that we can choose to see any event--starting a new job or being laid off from an old one, getting married or getting divorced--as an opportunity to find the good. As she says, “We are all writing our own obituary every day by how we live. The best news is that there’s still time for additions and revisions before it goes to press.” Ever since Algonquin published her first book, the New York Times bestseller If You Lived Here, I’d Know Your Name, Heather Lende has been praised for her storytelling talent and her plainspoken wisdom. The Los Angeles Times called her “part Annie Dillard, part Anne Lamott,” and that comparison has never been more apt as she gives us a fresh, positive perspective from which to view our relationships, our obligations, our priorities, our community, and our world. An antidote to the cynicism and self-centeredness that we are bombarded with every day in the news, in our politics, and even at times in ourselves, Find the Good helps us rediscover what’s right with the world. “Heather Lende’s small town is populated with big hearts--she finds them on the beach, walking her granddaughters, in the stories of ordinary peoples’ lives, and knits them into unforgettable tales. Find the Good is a treasure.” —Jo-Ann Mapson, author of Owen’s Daughter “Find the Good is excellent company in unsteady times . . . Heather Lende is the kind of person you want to sit across the kitchen table from on a rainy afternoon with a bottomless cup of tea. When things go wrong, when things go right, her quiet, commonsense wisdom, self-examining frankness, and good-natured humor offer a chance to reset, renew, rebalance.” —Pam Houston, author of Contents May Have Shifted “With gentle humor and empathy [Lende] introduces a number of people who provide examples of how to live well . . . [Find the Good] is simple yet profound.” —Booklist “In this cynical world, Find the Good is a tonic, a literary wellspring, which will continue to run, and nurture, even in times of drought. What a brave and beautiful thing Heather Lende has made with this book.” —John Straley, Shamus Award winner and former writer laureate of Alaska “Heather Lende is a terrific writer and terrific company: intimate, authentic, and as quirky as any of her subjects.” —Marilyn Johnson, author of The Dead Beat
Download or read book The Obituary Writer written by Porter Shreve and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2000-06-07 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gordie Hatch is twenty-two, charmingly naive, and certain that his first job as a writer for the ST LOUIS INDEPENDENT'S obituary page will be a stepping stone to a crackerjack career in journalism. The year is 1989, and Gordie watches helplessly while dramatic events -- the very events that could be his lucky break -- unfold in the world around him. But nothing can prepare him for the call he gets from Alicia Whiting, a young widow with an accent he can't quite place. When Gordie agrees to meet Alicia, against his better judgment, his journalistic curiosity quickly turns into an obsessive search for the outrageous truth behind the Whiting family. Shot through with affectionate humor and surprising twists and turns, THE OBITUARY WRITER introduces an author of enormous talent and heart. Porter Shreve brings a deft touch to the moments that mark a young person's entrance into the world, and a sharp eye to the ways in which the lead story can be wonderfully, seductively misleading.
Download or read book Obit written by Jim Sheeler and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2008-04-29 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Like Everything I Really Needed to Know, I Learned in Kindergarten, or Tuesdays with Morrie, Obit is a wise and deeply moving book that illuminates the human condition. For ten years, Jim Sheeler has scoured Colorado looking for subjects whose stories he will tell for the last time. Most are unknowns, but that doesn't mean they're nobodies. Their obituaries are sometimes humorous, sometimes heartbreaking, and chock full of life lessons as taught by the people we all pass on the street every day. And thanks to Sheeler's brilliant and compassionate prose, it's not too late to meet them.
Download or read book The Economist Book of Obituaries written by Keith Colquhoun and published by Bloomberg Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For 10 years, "The Economist" has included unique and original obituaries in a popular column. The selections are remarkable because of the people written about, the surprising lives they led, and the brilliant writing style. This volume gathers 200 of the best obituaries.
Download or read book Getting Off at Elysian Fields written by John Pope and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2015-10-19 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No city in America knows how to mark death with more funerary panache than New Orleans. The pageants commemorating departed citizens are often in themselves works of performance art. A grand obituary remains key to this Stygian passage. And no one writes them like New Orleanian John Pope. Collected here are not just simple, mindless recitations of schools and workplaces, marriages, and mourners bereft. These pieces in Getting Off at Elysian Fields: Obituaries from the New Orleans “Times-Picayune” are full-blooded life stories with accounts of great achievements, dubious dabblings, unavoidable foibles, relationships gone sour, and happenstances that turn out to be life-changing. To be sure, there are stories about Carnival monarchs, great philanthropists, and a few politicians. But because New Orleans embraces eccentric behavior, there are stories of people who colored way outside the lines. For instance, there was the doctor who used his plasma to make his flowers grow, and the philanthropist who took money she had put aside for a fur coat to underwrite the lawsuit that desegregated Tulane University. A letter carrier everyone loved turned out to have been a spy during World War II, and a fledgling lawyer changed his lifelong thoughts about race when he saw blind people going into a Christmas party through separate doors—one for white people and another for African Americans. Then there was the punctilious judge who got down on his hands and knees to edge his lawn—with scissors. Because New Orleans funerals are distinctive, the author includes accounts of four that he covered, complete with soulful singing and even some dancing. As a popular, local bumper sticker indisputably declares, “New Orleans—We Put the Fun in Funeral.”
Download or read book The Obituary Writer written by Patrick Oster and published by . This book was released on 2020-07-04 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Something just didn't seem right when Wallace McRae got word in the middle of the night that an eminent chemist he'd just interviewed had taken his own life by slashing his wrists with a straight razor in his bath tub.McRae's job, which he'd been forced to take after getting fired for drinking, was to prepare obituaries of famous, older people so his new employer, dead.com, could respond to a person's death with a quick story, ideally full of dirt and rumors that would attract online viewers - and advertising. His odious boss's motto on how far to go in writing an obituary was: "You can't libel a dead man."Taking the job was a Faustian bargain. McRae, known to all as just Mack, had traded his skills as a prize-winning investigative reporter for health insurance that covered the mounting medical bills of his dying wife.Mack had often interviewed the dead chemist, who was obsessed with winning the Nob el Prize for his breakthrough work on obesity and dementia. As he told his boss the night he got the news of the man's death: "He didn't have a suicidal bone in his body."Intrigued, his boss ordered him to dig into the matter, mostly because he saw the possibility of millions of eyeballs coming to his obituary website to read a juicy, viral story. Mack saw something different: a chance to redeem himself with a legitimate scoop that showed the man's official suicide had been something more sinister.As he would find, others with a huge financial interest in the true story were willing to resort to threats and even murder to muzzle Mack before he could print the truth.
Download or read book Obit written by Victoria Chang and published by Copper Canyon Press. This book was released on 2020-04-07 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2020 Time Magazine's 100 Must-Read Books of 2020 NPR's Best Books of 2020 National Book Award in Poetry, Longlist Frank Sanchez Book Award After her mother died, poet Victoria Chang refused to write elegies. Rather, she distilled her grief during a feverish two weeks by writing scores of poetic obituaries for all she lost in the world. In Obit, Chang writes of “the way memory gets up after someone has died and starts walking.” These poems reinvent the form of newspaper obituary to both name what has died (“civility,” “language,” “the future,” “Mother’s blue dress”) and the cultural impact of death on the living. Whereas elegy attempts to immortalize the dead, an obituary expresses loss, and the love for the dead becomes a conduit for self-expression. In this unflinching and lyrical book, Chang meets her grief and creates a powerful testament for the living. "When you lose someone you love, the world doesn’t stop to let you mourn. Nor does it allow you to linger as you learn to live with a gaping hole in your heart. Indeed, this daily indifference to being left behind epitomizes the unique pain of grieving. Victoria Chang captures this visceral, heart-stopping ache in Obit, the book of poetry she wrote after the death of her mother. Although Chang initially balked at writing an obituary, she soon found herself writing eulogies for the small losses that preceded and followed her mother’s death, each one an ode to her mother’s life and influence. Chang also thoughtfully examines how she will be remembered by her own children in time."—Time Magazine
Download or read book St Burl s Obituary written by Daniel Akst and published by MacAdam/Cage Publishing. This book was released on 1996 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A burlesque of death, resurrection and dinner, this novel is a love story, a thriller, and an allegory on the state of modern manhood. When he stumbles one night into a gangland slaying Burleigh Bennett's life of moral virtue and culinary vice is turned upside down.
Download or read book Modern Loss written by Rebecca Soffer and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2018-01-23 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inspired by the website that the New York Times hailed as "redefining mourning," this book is a fresh and irreverent examination into navigating grief and resilience in the age of social media, offering comfort and community for coping with the mess of loss through candid original essays from a variety of voices, accompanied by gorgeous two-color illustrations and wry infographics. At a time when we mourn public figures and national tragedies with hashtags, where intimate posts about loss go viral and we receive automated birthday reminders for dead friends, it’s clear we are navigating new terrain without a road map. Let’s face it: most of us have always had a difficult time talking about death and sharing our grief. We’re awkward and uncertain; we avoid, ignore, or even deny feelings of sadness; we offer platitudes; we send sympathy bouquets whittled out of fruit. Enter Rebecca Soffer and Gabrielle Birkner, who can help us do better. Each having lost parents as young adults, they co-founded Modern Loss, responding to a need to change the dialogue around the messy experience of grief. Now, in this wise and often funny book, they offer the insights of the Modern Loss community to help us cry, laugh, grieve, identify, and—above all—empathize. Soffer and Birkner, along with forty guest contributors including Lucy Kalanithi, singer Amanda Palmer, and CNN’s Brian Stelter, reveal their own stories on a wide range of topics including triggers, sex, secrets, and inheritance. Accompanied by beautiful hand-drawn illustrations and witty "how to" cartoons, each contribution provides a unique perspective on loss as well as a remarkable life-affirming message. Brutally honest and inspiring, Modern Loss invites us to talk intimately and humorously about grief, helping us confront the humanity (and mortality) we all share. Beginners welcome.
Download or read book The Dead Beat written by Marilyn Johnson and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2006-02-28 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times comes each morning and never fails to deliver news of the important dead. Every day is new; every day is fraught with significance. I arrange my cup of tea, prop up my slippers. Obituaries are history as it is happening. Whose time am I living in? Was he a success or a failure, lucky or doomed, older than I am or younger? Did she know how to live? I shake out the pages. Tell me the secret of a good life!Where else can you celebrate the life of the pharmacist who moonlighted as a spy, the genius behind Sea Monkeys, the school lunch lady who spent her evenings as a ballroom hostess? No wonder so many readers skip the news and the sports and go directly to the obituary page. The Dead Beat is the story of how these stories get told. Enthralled by the fascinating lives that were marching out of this world, Marilyn Johnson tumbled into the obits page to find out what made it so lively. She sought out the best obits in the English language and chased the people who spent their lives writing about the dead. Surveying the darkest corners of Internet chat rooms, surviving a mass gathering of obituarists, and making a pilgrimage to London to savor the most caustic and literate obits of all, Marilyn Johnson leads us into the cult and culture behind the obituary page. The result is a rare combination of scrapbook and compelling read, a trip through recent history and the unusual lives we don't quite appreciate until they're gone.
Download or read book Knitting Circle A Novel written by Ann Hood and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2008-01-17 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An intelligent, moving read" (Pages) and "a testament to women’s friendship and to Ann Hood’s talent" (Hilma Wolitzer). After the loss of her only child, Mary Baxter finds herself unable to read or write, the activities that used to be her primary source of comfort. She reluctantly joins a knitting circle as a way to fill her lonely days—not knowing it will change her life. As they teach Mary new knitting techniques, the women in the circle also reveal their own secrets of loss, love, and hope. With time, Mary is finally able to tell her own story of grief, and in so doing finds the spark of life again.
Download or read book The Last Word written by Marvin Siegel and published by William Morrow. This book was released on 1997 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: You may not have heard of Julian Hill, for example, but he revolutionized our lives as the inventor of nylon, and you'll learn more about him in The Last Word.
Download or read book If You Lived Here I d Know Your Name written by Heather Lende and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2006-03-29 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Part Annie Dillard, part Anne Lamott, essayist and NPR commentator Heather Lende introduces readers to life in the town of Haines, Alaska . . . subtly reminding readers to embrace each day, each opportunity, each life that touches our own and to note the beauty of it all.” —The Los Angeles Times Tiny Haines, Alaska, is ninety miles north of Juneau, accessible mainly by water or air—and only when the weather is good. There's no traffic light and no mail delivery; people can vanish without a trace and funerals are a community affair. Heather Lende posts both the obituaries and the social column for her local newspaper. If anyone knows the going-on in this close-knit town—from births to weddings to funerals—she does. Whether contemplating the mysterious death of eccentric Speedy Joe, who wore nothing but a red union suit and a hat he never took off, not even for a haircut; researching the details of a one-legged lady gold miner's adventurous life; worrying about her son's first goat-hunting expedition; observing the awe-inspiring Chilkat Bald Eagle Festival; or ice skating in the shadow of glacier-studded mountains, Lende's warmhearted style brings us inside her small-town life. We meet her husband, Chip, who owns the local lumber yard; their five children; and a colorful assortment of quirky friends and neighbors, including aging hippies, salty fishermen, native Tlingit Indians, and volunteer undertakers—as well as the moose, eagles, sea lions, and bears with whom they share this wild and perilous land. Like Bailey White's tales of Southern life or Garrison Keillor's reports from the Midwest, NPR commentator Heather Lende's take on her offbeat Alaskan hometown celebrates life in a dangerous and breathtakingly beautiful place. Heather Lende's new book, Of Bears and Ballots: An Alaskan Adventure in Small-Town Politics is available now.
Download or read book Mobituaries written by Mo Rocca and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-11-02 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From popular TV correspondent and writer Rocca comes a charmingly irreverent and rigorously researched book that celebrates the dead people who made life worth living.
Download or read book Jude Banks Superhero written by Ann Hood and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-05-18 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times best-selling author Ann Hood pens a poignant story of grief and resilience, perfect for readers of The Thing About Jellyfish. "A testament to the power of human connection.” —Jack Cheng, award-winning author of See You in the Cosmos Katie was Jude's favorite person in the world. And not many brothers say that about their sister and mean it. But to Jude, Katie was everything--the person who made him learn how to say "I love you" in every language, who performed dramatic readings of Romeo and Juliet, who obsessed over every item on the diner menu looking for the most authentic diner meal. The one who called him "Jude Banks, Superhero," because to her, Jude was the best. She was also the person who died. Out of nowhere, and without a goodbye. And Jude believes he was the one who killed her. Now, twelve-year-old Jude must figure out what life looks like without his favorite person. With Mom checked out, and Dad just trying to do his best, Jude enters a world of grief youth groups and dropped-off lasagnas. It's only when he meets a girl named Clementine, who also lost a sibling, that he begins to imagine a world where maybe things might be okay. But Clementine is also feeling a terrible guilt, and even though Katie called Jude a "superhero," he isn't sure he can save her. In her signature prose, Hood crafts an extraordinary story of grief and resilience, asking the important question: How does a family begin to heal? Praise for Jude Banks, Superhero: "Hood is brilliant at showing the ordinary moments of a family’s heartbreak… There are many readers who are navigating guilt and sorrow right now — for them, this book is a must. And for those lucky enough to take the journey only in their imaginations, this is a story of resilience in the face of devastating pain.”—New York Times Book Review "A tender story of grief and joy... a remarkable read."—School Library Connection (Starred Review) "Hood’s careful gardening of emotions makes this a striking read... Fans of Ali Benjamin's The Thing about Jellyfish will appreciate Jude’s search for meaning and reason as he learns to live around the hole his sister has left."—Booklist (Starred Review) “Ann Hood tells Jude’s story of grief without coating it in too much sugar; it’s real, and therein lies its power. Jude Banks is a mirror for anyone who’s experienced loss, and a testament to the power of human connection.”—Jack Cheng, award-winning author of See You in the Cosmos "Jude Banks is warm and inviting, even as it balances the difficult topics of loss and healing—a powerful and compelling story for anyone who has known loss."—Rex Ogle, award winning author of Free Lunch
Download or read book The Obituary Writer written by Ann Hood and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2013-03-04 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An obituary writer searching for her missing lover at the turn of the twentieth century is linked to a woman considering leaving her loveless marriage in 1963.
