Personal essays share the author's adventures after buying a vacation house on the Carolina coast and his reflections on middle age and mortality.

"From Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Ford: the final novel in the world of Frank Bascombe, one of the most indelible characters in American literature Over the course of four celebrated works of fiction and almost forty years, Richard Ford has crafted an ambitious, incisive, and singular view of American life as lived. Unconstrained, astute, provocative, often laugh-out-loud funny, Frank Bascombe is once more our guide to the great American midway....

"Each year, approximately forty thousand Americans are killed by gunshot wounds, which is roughly equivalent to the annual rate of traffic deaths on American roads and highways. Of those forty thousand gun fatalities, more than half of them are suicides, which in turn account for half of all suicides per year. Add in the murders caused by guns, the accidental deaths caused by guns, the law enforcement killings caused by guns, and the average comes...

"Only one hundred years ago, in even the world's wealthiest nations, children died in great numbers--of diarrhea, diphtheria, and measles, of scarlet fever and tuberculosis. Throughout history, culture has been shaped by these deaths; diaries and letters recorded them, and writers such as Louisa May Alcott, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Eugene O'Neill wrote about and mourned them. Not even the powerful and the wealthy could escape: of Abraham and Mary Lincoln's...

"An award-winning documentary filmmaker, Shelby Apple is obsessed with re-imagining the full story of the Learned Man--a prehistoric man whose remains are believed to be the link between Africa and ancient Australia. From Vietnam to northern Africa and the Australian Outback, Shelby searches for understanding of this enigmatic man from the ancient past, unaware that the two men share a great deal in common. Some 40,000 years in the past, the Learned...

From the acclaimed author of The Hard Way on Purpose comes a vibrant, heartfelt memoir about confronting mortality, surviving loss, finding resilience in one's roots and seeking a father's wisdom through an unusual woodworking project -- constructing his own coffin. With wisdom and humor, Giffels grapples with the hard questions as he and his father saw, hammer, and sand their way through a year bowed by loss.

Humanity is on the verge of discovering immortality. The avatar of Death is cast down to Earth to live a mortal life in Mumbai as twenty-something Laila Starr. Will Laila take her chance to stop mankind from permanently altering the cycle of life?

"Courageous, insightful and candid thoughts on malady and mortality from one of our most celebrated writers"--Provided by the publisher.

"A fresh, fierce, and timely meditation on data, pain, time, and the limited capacity of literature to comprehend life and death in a sensate and vulnerable body." -- When Boyer was diagnosed with highly aggressive triple-negative breast cancer, the illness was both a crisis and an initiation into new ideas about mortality and the gendered politics of illness. Here she explores the experience of illness as mediated by digital screens, weaving in...

"Based on his popular series in the New York Times chronicling his cross-country bicycle trip, bestselling author Bruce Weber shares his adventures from his solo ride across the USA. Riding a bicycle across the US is one of those bucket-list goals that many dream about but few achieve. Bestselling author and New York Times reporter Bruce Weber made the trip, solo, over the summer and fall of 2011--at the age of fifty-seven. Expanding upon his popular...