The Grim Reader

   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   A compelling collection of poems, fiction, letters, historical documents, essays, and narrations from a wide variety of writers, including: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
 

This compelling anthology of poems, letters, historical documents, essays, and fictions on the emotions, experiences, and rituals accompanying death and dying.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. 384 pp. 15,000 print.

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."

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.