Catalog Search Results
1) Calypso
Author
Language
English
Description
When he buys a beach house on the Carolina coast, David Sedaris envisions long, relaxing vacations spent playing board games and lounging in the sun with those he loves most. And life at the Sea Section, as he names the vacation home, is exactly as idyllic as he imagined, except for one tiny, vexing realization: it's impossible to take a vacation from yourself. Sedaris sets his powers of observation toward middle age and mortality, that vertiginous...
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
"From the author of the bestselling memoir Wild Game comes a riveting novel about Cape Cod, complicated families, and long-buried secrets-for fans of the New York Times bestsellers The Paper Palace and Ask Again, Yes.Ken and Abby Gardner lost their mother when they were small and they have been haunted by her absence ever since. Their father, Adam, a brilliant oceanographer, raised them mostly on his own in his remote home on Cape Cod, where the attachment...
Author
Pub. Date
2023.
Language
English
Formats
Description
"Each year, approximately forty thousand Americans are killed by gunshot wounds, which is roughly equivalent to the annual rate of traffic deaths on American roads and highways. Of those forty thousand gun fatalities, more than half of them are suicides, which in turn account for half of all suicides per year. Add in the murders caused by guns, the accidental deaths caused by guns, the law enforcement killings caused by guns, and the average comes...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
At the age of sixty-one, George Hall settles to a comfortable retirement. His tempestuous daughter, Katie, then announces that she is getting remarried to the deeply inappropriate Ray to her family's displeasure. Her mother, Jean, is disgusted with the huge preparation the wedding entails, which also disrupts her late-life affair with one of her husband's ex-colleagues. The seemingly neat and pleasant life of George and Jean's son, Jamie, disintegrates...
Author
Series
Pub. Date
[2017]
Language
English
Formats
Description
Edwidge Danticat's The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story is at once a personal account of her mother dying from cancer and a deeply considered reckoning with the ways that other writers have approached death in their own work. "Writing has been the primary way I have tried to make sense of my losses," Danticat notes in her introduction. "I have been writing about death for as long as I have been writing." The book moves outward from the shock...
Author
Language
English
Description
Eudora Honeysett is done with this noisy, moronic world--all of it. She has witnessed the indignities and suffering of old age and has lived a full life. At eighty-five, she isn't going to leave things to chance. Her end will be on her terms. With one call to a clinic in Switzerland, a plan is set in motion. Then she meets ten-year-old Rose Trewidney, a whirling, pint-sized rainbow of color and sparkling cheer. All Eudora wants is to be left alone...
Author
Language
English
Description
Ehrenreich's core philosophy holds that aging people have the right to determine their quality of life and may choose to forgo painful and generally ineffective treatments. She presents evidence that such tests as annual physicals and Pap smears have little effect in prolonging life; investigates wellness trends, including mindfulness meditation; and questions the doctrine of a harmonious "mindbody" and its supposed natural tendency to prolong life....
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
Our narrator's days are numbered. Estranged from his family, living alone with only his cat Cabbage for company, he was unprepared for the doctor's diagnosis that he has only months to live. But before he can set about tackling his bucket list, the Devil appears with a special offer: in exchange for making one thing in the world disappear, he can have one extra day of life. And so begins a very bizarre week ... Because how do you decide what makes...
10) Be mine
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
"From Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Ford: the final novel in the world of Frank Bascombe, one of the most indelible characters in American literature Over the course of four celebrated works of fiction and almost forty years, Richard Ford has crafted an ambitious, incisive, and singular view of American life as lived. Unconstrained, astute, provocative, often laugh-out-loud funny, Frank Bascombe is once more our guide to the great American midway....
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
"In the half a square mile of decay and demolition that was England's Saxon capital, eternity is loitering between the firetrap housing projects. Embedded in the grubby amber of the district's narrative among its saints, kings, prostitutes, and derelicts a different kind of human time is happening, a soiled simultaneity that does not differentiate between the petrolcolored puddles and the fractured dreams of those who navigate them. Fiends last mentioned...
12) Daytripper
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
"The Eisner Award winning DAYTRIPPER follows the life of one man, Bras de Olivias Dominguez. Every chapter features an important period in Bras' life in exotic Brazil, and each story ends the same way: with his death. And then, the following story starts up at a different point in his life, oblivious to his death in the previous story-and then also ends with him dying again. In every chapter, Bras dies at different moments in his life, as the story...
13) Mortality
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Mortality is the most meditative piece of writing Hitchens has ever produced; at once an unsparingly honest account of the ravages of his disease, an examination of cancer WC etiquette, and the coda to a lifetime of fierce debate and peerless prose.
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
In a novel of breathtaking reach and inspired imagination, the Booker Prize-winning author of Schindler's Ark tells the stories of two men who have much in common. What separates them is 42,000 years. Shade lives with his second wife amid their clan on the shores of a bountiful lake. A peaceable man, he knows that when danger threatens, the Hero ancestors will call on him to kill, or sacrifice himself, to save his people. Over 40,000 years later,...
15) RoboCop
Language
English
Formats
Description
In a near future. Detroit has slowly become the center of criminal activity when a gang who likes to kill cops goes on the rise. Omni Consumer Products eventually seizes control of local law enforcement. Just assigned to the Metro West Precinct is Officer Alex Murphy. Alex is massacred by the gang, as his partner Anne Lewis is barely able to do nothing. At the same time, a young visionary executive, Bob Morton, seizes his chance when the ED-209 law...
Author
Publisher
Graywolf Press
Pub. Date
[2019]
Language
English
Description
The Silk Road begins on a mat in yoga class, deep within a labyrinth on a settlement somewhere in the icy north, under the canny guidance of Jee Moon. When someone fails to arise from corpse pose, the Astronomer, the Archivist, the Botanist, the Keeper, the Topologist, the Geographer, the Iceman, and the Cook remember the paths that brought them there--paths on which they still seem to be traveling. The Silk Road also begins in rivalrous skirmishing...
Author
Publisher
W. W. Norton & Company
Pub. Date
[2020]
Language
English
Description
"The fight against child mortality that transformed parenting, doctoring, and the way we live. Only one hundred years ago, even in the world's wealthiest nations, children died in great numbers-of diarrhea, diphtheria, and measles, of scarlet fever and meningitis. Culture was shaped by these deaths; diaries and letters recorded them, poets and writers from Louisa May Alcott to Eugene O'Neill wrote about and lamented them. Not even the high and mighty...
Author
Publisher
Penguin Press
Pub. Date
2007
Language
English
Description
This is a hauntingly moving memoir of the relationship between a cadaver named Eve and the first-year medical student who cuts her open.Christine Montross was a nervous first-year medical student, standing outside the anatomy lab on her first day of class, preparing herself for what was to come. Entering a room with stainless-steel tables topped by corpses in body bags is shocking no matter how long you've prepared yourself, but a strange thing happened...
Series
Publisher
BBC
Pub. Date
[2018]
Language
English
Description
This Christmas, the Doctor comes face to face with, the Doctor! The first and current Doctors contemplate mortality in the Arctic as the join forces against a common enemy, revisit another last-of-its-kind being, and are ultimately responsible for the life of a WWI soldier.
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