The Grim Reader: Writings on Death, Dying, and Living On - Paperback

by Maura Spiegel (Editor), Richard Tristman (Editor)

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A compelling collection of poems, fiction, letters, historical documents, essays, and narrations from a wide variety of writers, including: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 Buñuel - Paul Monette - Jessica Mitford - Stanley Elkin

Author Biography

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.