Sitting Up with the Dead

Sitting Up with the Dead
Author: Pamela Petro
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 439
Release: 2017-02-14
Genre: Travel
ISBN: 1628727748

For the first time in paperback, an acclaimed look at the American South through the lenses of its most acclaimed storytellers and their tales. Rarely does a nonfiction work come along that is as original and refreshing as Sitting Up with the Dead. Here, take a ride with Pamela Petro as she embarks on a series of road trips through the states of the Old South to collect its stories and meet its tellers of traditional tales. Some of them are local celebrities, others national treasures. Among them are Ray Hicks, a National Heritage Fellow; Kathryn Windham, the “ghost lady”; Nancy Basket, a kudzu paper-maker; Colonel Rod, self-proclaimed “Florida cracker”; and Grammy Award-winner David Holt. You encounter plat-eyes and boo-hags, Jack the trickster and Brer Rabbit, mule eggs, singing turtles, talking corpses, and flying Africans from the sea islands of South Carolina. Stories provide the connective tissue of the South, linking the past with the present. They join communities as widespread as the coastal plains of the Carolinas and Georgia, the swamps of the Gulf Coast, and the mountains and valleys of Appalachia. As distinctly American as jazz, they blend cultures and oral traditions as diverse as those of southern England, Ireland, West Africa, and native America. They contain bits of lived history, both from before the Civil War and after. In Sitting Up with the Dead, Pamela Petro offers a paradoxical wake for the undying body of the Old South, to hear its truths and contemplate its robust afterlife in the tallest, “lyingest,” most fruitful, and most haunting of its tales.

The Long Field

The Long Field
Author: Pamela Petro
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 327
Release: 2023-08-15
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1956763767

For readers of H Is for Hawk, an intimate memoir of belonging and loss and a mesmerizing travelogue through the landscapes and language of Wales Hiraeth is a Welsh word that's famously hard to translate. Literally, it can mean "long field" but generally translates into English, inadequately, as "homesickness." At heart, hiraeth suggests something like a bone-deep longing for an irretrievable place, person, or time—an acute awareness of the presence of absence. In The Long Field, Pamela Petro braids essential hiraeth stories of Wales with tales from her own life—as an American who found an ancient home in Wales, as a gay woman, as the survivor of a terrible AMTRAK train crash, and as the daughter of a parent with dementia. Through the pull and tangle of these stories and her travels throughout Wales, hiraeth takes on radical new meanings. There is traditional hiraeth of place and home, but also queer hiraeth; and hiraeth triggered by technology, immigration, ecological crises, and our new divisive politics. On this journey, the notion begins to morph from a uniquely Welsh experience to a universal human condition, from deep longing to the creative responses to loss that Petro sees as the genius of Welsh culture. It becomes a tool to understand ourselves in our time. A finalist for the Wales Book of the Year Award and named to the Telegraph's and Financial Times's Top 10 lists for travel writing, The Long Field is an unforgettable exploration of “the hidden contours of the human heart.”

The Book of the Dead

The Book of the Dead
Author: Muriel Rukeyser
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2018
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781946684219

Written in response to the Hawk's Nest Tunnel disaster of 1931 in Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, The Book of the Dead is an important part of West Virginia's cultural heritage and a powerful account of one of the worst industrial catastrophes in American history. The poems collected here investigate the roots of a tragedy that killed hundreds of workers, most of them African American. They are a rare engagement with the overlap between race and environment in Appalachia. Published for the first time alongside photographs by Nancy Naumburg, who accompanied Rukeyser to Gauley Bridge in 1936, this edition of The Book of the Dead includes an introduction by Catherine Venable Moore, whose writing on the topic has been anthologized in Best American Essays.

The Coffin Confessor

The Coffin Confessor
Author: Bill Edgar
Publisher: Penguin Group Australia
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2021-07-02
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 176014570X

Imagine you are dying with a secret. Something you’ve never had the courage to tell your friends and family. Or a last wish – a task you need carried out before you can rest in peace. Now imagine there’s a man who can take care of all that, who has no respect for the living, who will do anything for the dead. Bill Edgar is the Coffin Confessor – a one-of-a-kind professional, a man on a mission to make good on these last requests on behalf of his soon-to-be-deceased clients. And this is the extraordinary story of how he became that man. Bill has been many things in this life: son of one of Australia’s most notorious gangsters, homeless street-kid, maximum-security prisoner, hard man, family man, car thief, professional punching bag, philosopher, inventor, private investigator, victim of horrific childhood sexual abuse and an activist fighting to bring down the institutions that let it happen. A survivor. As a little boy, he learned the hard way that society is full of people who fall through the cracks – who die without their stories being told. Now his life’s work is to make sure his clients’ voices are heard, and their last wishes delivered: the small-town grandfather who needs his tastefully decorated sex dungeon destroyed before the kids find it. The woman who endured an abusive marriage for decades before finding freedom. The outlaw biker who is afraid of nothing . . . except telling the world he is in love with another man. The dad who desperately needs to track down his estranged daughter so he can find a way to say he's sorry, with one final gift. Confronting and confounding, heartwarming and heartbreaking, The Coffin Confessor is a compelling story of survival and redemption, of a life lived on the fringes of society, on both sides of the law – and what that can teach you about living your best life . . . and death.

The Victorian Book of the Dead

The Victorian Book of the Dead
Author: Chris Woodyard
Publisher: Kestrel Publications (OH)
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014
Genre: Antiques & Collectibles
ISBN: 9780988192522

Macabre tales of death and mourning in Victorian America.

Where the Dead Sit Talking

Where the Dead Sit Talking
Author: Brandon Hobson
Publisher: Soho Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2018
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1616958871

With his single mother in jail, Sequoyah, a 15-year-old Cherokee boy, is placed in foster care with the Troutt family. Literally and figuratively scarred by his unstable upbringing, Sequoyah has spent years mostly keeping to himself, living with his emotions pressed deep below the surface - that is, until he meets 17-year-old Rosemary, another youth staying with the Troutts. Sequoyah and Rosemary bond over their shared Native American background and tumultuous paths through the foster care system, but as Sequoyah's feelings towards Rosemary deepen, the precariousness of their lives and the scars of their pasts threaten to undo them both.

The Brief History of the Dead

The Brief History of the Dead
Author: Kevin Brockmeier
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2006-02-14
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0375424237

From Kevin Brockmeier, one of this generation's most inventive young writers, comes a striking new novel about death, life, and the mysterious place in between. The City is inhabited by those who have departed Earth but are still remembered by the living. They will reside in this afterlife until they are completely forgotten. But the City is shrinking, and the residents clearing out. Some of the holdouts, like Luka Sims, who produces the City’s only newspaper, are wondering what exactly is going on. Others, like Coleman Kinzler, believe it is the beginning of the end. Meanwhile, Laura Byrd is trapped in an Antarctic research station, her supplies are running low, her radio finds only static, and the power is failing. With little choice, Laura sets out across the ice to look for help, but time is running out. Kevin Brockmeier alternates these two storylines to create a lyrical and haunting story about love, loss and the power of memory.

The Dead

The Dead
Author: James Joyce
Publisher: Coyote Canyon Press
Total Pages: 80
Release: 2008-10
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0979660793

"The Dead is one of the twentieth century's most beautiful pieces of short literature. Taking his inspiration from a family gathering held every year on the Feast of the Epiphany, Joyce pens a story about a married couple attending a Christmas-season party at the house of the husband's two elderly aunts. A shocking confession made by the husband's wife toward the end of the story showcases the power of Joyce's greatest innovation: the epiphany, that moment when everything, for character and reader alike, is suddenly clear.

Continuing Bonds

Continuing Bonds
Author: Dennis Klass
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 388
Release: 2014-05-12
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1317763602

First published in 1996. This new book gives voice to an emerging consensus among bereavement scholars that our understanding of the grief process needs to be expanded. The dominant 20th century model holds that the function of grief and mourning is to cut bonds with the deceased, thereby freeing the survivor to reinvest in new relationships in the present. Pathological grief has been defined in terms of holding on to the deceased. Close examination reveals that this model is based more on the cultural values of modernity than on any substantial data of what people actually do. Presenting data from several populations, 22 authors - among the most respected in their fields - demonstrate that the health resolution of grief enables one to maintain a continuing bond with the deceased. Despite cultural disapproval and lack of validation by professionals, survivors find places for the dead in their on-going lives and even in their communities. Such bonds are not denial: the deceased can provide resources for enriched functioning in the present. Chapters examine widows and widowers, bereaved children, parents and siblings, and a population previously excluded from bereavement research: adoptees and their birth parents. Bereavement in Japanese culture is also discussed, as are meanings and implications of this new model of grief. Opening new areas of research and scholarly dialogue, this work provides the basis for significant developments in clinical practice in the field.