The Grim Reader - by Maura Spiegel & Richard Tristman (Paperback)

About the Book

This compelling anthology of poems, letters, historical documents, essays, and fictions on the emotions, experiences, and rituals accompanying death and dying. "The Grim Reader" offers a fresh and unmediated encounter with mortality and the many dimensions of grief.

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A compelling collection of poems, fiction, letters, historical documents, essays, and narrations from a wide variety of writers, including: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

About the Author

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.