Edwidge Danticat’s The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story is at once a personal account of her mother dying from cancer and a deeply considered reckoning with the ways that other writers have approached death in their own work. “Writing has been the primary way I have tried to make sense of my losses,” Danticat notes in her introduction. “I have been writing about death for as long as I have been writing.” The book moves outward from the shock of her mother’s diagnosis and sifts through Danticat’s writing life and personal history, all the while shifting fluidly from examples that range from Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude to Toni Morrison’s Sula. The narrative, which continually circles the many incarnations of death from individual to large-scale catastrophes, culminates in a beautiful, heartrending prayer in the voice of Danticat's mother. A moving tribute and work of astute criticism, The Art of Death is a book that will profoundly alter all who encounter it.

BIO

Edwidge Danticat is the author of numerous books, including Brother, I'm Dying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a National Book Award finalist; Breath, Eyes, Memory, an Oprah Book Club selection; Krik? Krak!, a National Book Award finalist; The Dew Breaker, winner of the inaugural Story Prize; The Farming of Bones, which won an American Book Award for fiction in 1999; and Claire of the Sea Light. The recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, she has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and elsewhere.

REVIEWS

“This book is a kind of prayer for her mother. . . . Danticat writes beautifully about fellow writers, dissecting their magic and technique with a reader’s passion and a craftsman’s appraising eye.” -- The New York Times

“[Danticat] layers her story with other poems, memoirs, novels and essays about death, scaling the personal to wider-ranging political and ecological catastrophes. . . . Deeply felt.” -- Los Angeles Times

“What’s important about reading great writing about death—or in the case of The Art of Death, reading about reading about it—is that it teaches us how to live.” -- Chicago Tribune

“Danticat taps into such tough subject matter . . . with a trickless, spellbinding clarity. . . . This small book is a bracingly clear-eyed take on its subject.” -- The Boston Globe

[P]  Graywolf Press  /  July 11, 2017

0.7" H x 6.9" L x 5.0" W (0.44 lbs) 160 pages