The Inevitable

Contemporary Writers Confront Death

By: Bradford Morrow, David Shields

Narrated by: Mike Maloney, Kim Stryker

What is death and how does it touch upon life? Twenty writers look for answers.

Birth is not inevitable. Life certainly isn't. The sole inevitability of existence, the only sure consequence of being alive, is death.

In these eloquent and surprising essays, 20 writers face this fact. Among them Geoff Dyer, who describes the ghost bikes memorializing those who die in biking accidents; Jonathan Safran Foer, proposing a new way of punctuating dialogue in the face of a family history of heart attacks and decimation by the Holocaust; Mark Doty, whose reflections on the art-porn movie Bijou lead to a meditation on the intersection of sex and death epitomized by the AIDS epidemic; and Joyce Carol Oates, who writes about the loss of her husband and faces her own mortality. Other contributors include Annie Dillard, Diane Ackerman, Peter Straub, and Brenda Hillman.

©2011 David Shields (P)2020 David Shields