The Depositions: New and Selected Essays on Being and Ceasing to Be - Hardcover

Lynch, Thomas

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1324003979 ISBN 13: 9781324003977

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019

Synopsis

A wry and compassionate selection of essays reflecting on mortals and mortality, from the acclaimed author of The Undertaking.

For nearly four decades, poet, essayist, and small-town funeral director Thomas Lynch has probed relations between the literary and mortuary arts. His life’s work with the dead and the bereaved has informed four previous collections of nonfiction, each exploring identity and humanity with Lynch’s signature blend of memoir, meditation, gallows humor, and poetic precision.

The Depositions provides an essential selection from these masterful collections―essays on fatherhood, Irish heritage, funeral rites, and the perils of bodiless obsequies―as well as new essays in which the space between Lynch’s hyphenated identities―as an Irish American, undertaker-poet―is narrowed by the deaths of poets, the funerals of friends, the loss of neighbors, intimate estrangements, and the slow demise of a beloved dog. In “Gladstone,” from The Undertaking, Lynch reflects on his then twenty-five years as an undertaker at the Midwinter Conference for Michigan funeral directors, which incongruously takes place on an island in the Caribbean. With brutal, generous honesty, “The Way We Are,” from Bodies in Motion and at Rest, grapples with Lynch’s time as a single parent coming to terms with generations of his family inheritance of alcoholism and recovery. The press of the author’s own mortality animates the new essays, sharpening a curiosity about where we come from, where we go, and what it means.

As Alan Ball writes in a penetrating foreword, Lynch’s work allows us “to see both the absurdity and the beauty of death, sometimes simultaneously.” With this landmark collection, he continues to illuminate not only how we die, but also how we live.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

Praise for Thomas Lynch

"Lynch engages the reader with a mixture of poetic and funerary elements...His voice is rich and generous."
– Richard Bernstein, New York Times

"Lynch’s vivid prose has the electricity of writing that tells us what is going on in the secret places of the community?and the secret places of the heart."
– USA Today

"[Lynch] is able to take us inside the palpable business of blood, tears, and the final verse of life in a manner that is almost shocking in the relief it delivers."
– Boston Globe

"Thomas Lynch is an original...If there were more Thomas Lynches in the world, it might be a little less full of hatred and have a little more room in it."
– George Bornstein, Times Literary Supplement

About the Author:

Thomas Lynch has authored five collections of poetry, one of stories, and four books of essays. His first, The Undertaking, won the Heartland Prize for Non-Fiction and the American Book Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. His writing has appeared in the Atlantic, Granta, Harper’s Magazine, and the New York Times, among other publications. He works as a funeral director in Milford, Michigan, and teaches at the Bear River Writer’s Conference.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1324003979
• ISBN 13: 9781324003977
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 352