The Award Tally
FictionNonfiction

Wishlist

Saved in this browser only - it isn't synced to your other devices.

Back to the full ranking
The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade cover

The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade

Thomas Lynch

0

awards won

4

score

#2645 of 3,809 books · #948 in Biography & Memoir

Shortlisted for the National Book Award for Nonfiction (1997).

The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade was a National Book Award Finalist. "Every year I bury a couple hundred of my townspeople." So opens this singular and wise testimony. Like all poets, inspired by death, Thomas Lynch is, unlike others, also hired to bury the dead or to cremate them and to tend to their families in a small Michigan town where he serves as the funeral director. In the conduct of these duties he has kept his eyes open, his ear tuned to the indispensable vernaculars of love and grief. In these twelve pieces his is the voice of both witness and functionary. Here, Lynch, poet to the dying, names the hurts and whispers the condolences and shapes the questions posed by this familiar mystery. So here is homage to parents who have died and to children who shouldn't have. Here are golfers tripping over grave markers, gourmands and hypochondriacs, lovers and suicides. These are the lessons for life our mortality teaches us.

Buy this book at AmazonAd
Publisher
W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN-13
9780393073409
Topics
Death and mourningFuneral industryGrief and human mortality

Awards

Other awarded books from Thomas Lynch

Thomas Lynch has no other awarded or shortlisted books yet.

If you liked The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade, you could also like these

Similar Topics