Love and Other Ways of Dying by Michael Paterniti

Love and Other Ways of Dying by Michael Paterniti

LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY KIRKUS REVIEWS In this moving, lyrical, and ultimately uplifting collection of essays, Michael Paterniti turns a keen eye on the full range of human experience, introducing us to an unforgettable cast of everyday people.
Michael Paterniti is one of the most original and empathic storytellers working today. His writing has been described as humane, devastating, and beautiful by Elizabeth Gilbert, spellbinding by Anthony Doerr, and expansive and joyful by George Saunders. In the seventeen wide-ranging essays collected for the first time in Love and Other Ways of Dying, he brings his full literary powers to bear, pondering happiness and grief, memory and the redemptive power of human connection.
In the remote Ukranian countryside, Paterniti picks apples (and faces mortality) with a real-life giant; in Nanjing, China, he confronts a distraught jumper on a suicide bridge; in Dodge City, Kansas, he takes up residence at a roadside hotel and sees, firsthand, the ways in which the racial divide turns neighbor against neighbor. In each instance, Paterniti illuminates the full spectrum of human experience, introducing us to unforgettable everyday people and bygone legends, exploring the big ideas and emotions that move us. Paterniti reenacts Francois Mitterrand s last meal in a rustic dining room in France and drives across America with Albert Einstein s brain in the trunk of his rental car, floating in a Tupperware container. He delves with heartbreaking detail into the aftermath of a plane crash off the coast of Nova Scotia, an earthquake in Haiti, and a tsunami in Japan and, in searing swirls of language, unearths the complicated, hidden truths these moments of extremity teach us about our ability to endure, and to love.
Michael Paterniti has spent the past two decades grappling with some of our most powerful subjects and incomprehensible events, taking an unflinching point of view that seeks to edify as it resists easy answers. At every turn, his work attempts to make sense of both love and loss, and leaves us with a profound sense of what it means to be human. As he writes in the Introduction to this book, The more we examine the grooves and scars of this life, the more free and complete we become.
Praise for Michael Paterniti
A fearless, spellbinding collection of inquiries by a brilliant, globally minded essayist whose writing is magic and whose worldview brims with compassion . . . Genius chefs, an eight-and-a-half-foot-tall giant, an earthquake, a jet crash, and a president who eats songbirds the size of Michael Paterniti s curiosity is matched only by the size of his heart. Anthony Doerr, author of All the Light We Cannot See
Michael Paterniti is a genius. Elizabeth Gilbert, author of The Signature of All Things
Michael Paterniti is one of the best living practitioners of the art of literary journalism, able to fully elucidate and humanize the everyday and the epic. In his hands, every subject, every moment of personal or global upheaval, is treated with the same curiosity, respect, empathy, and clear-eyed wisdom. Dave Eggers, author of The Circle
I have been waiting years for this collection. In each of these essays, Michael Paterniti unveils life for us, the beauty and heartbreak of it, as we would never see it ourselves but now can never forget it. Paterniti is brilliant a rare master and one of my favorite authors on earth. Lily King, author of Euphoria

Paterniti, Michael: - Michael Paterniti is the New York Times bestselling author of Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain. His writing has appeared in many publications, including The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Harper's, Outside, Esquire, and GQ, where he works as a correspondent. Paterniti has been nominated eight times for the National Magazine Award and is the recipient of an NEA grant and two MacDowell Fellowships. He is the co-founder of a children's storytelling center (www.tellingroom.com) in Portland, Maine, where he lives with his wife and their three children.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780385337021
ISBN 10	0385337027
Title	Love and Other Ways of Dying
Author	Michael Paterniti
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Dial Press
Year published	2015-03-03
Number of pages	464
Prizes	Short-listed for National Book Awards (Nonfiction) 2015
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.