The Book of Resting Places: A Personal History of Where We Lay the Dead

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Product Details
Price
$26.00  $24.18
Publisher
Counterpoint LLC
Publish Date
Pages
208
Dimensions
5.7 X 8.4 X 0.9 inches | 0.75 pounds
Language
English
Type
Hardcover
EAN/UPC
9781619021235

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About the Author
Thomas Mira Y Lopez is from New York City. He earned an M.F.A. in creative nonfiction from the University of Arizona, and his work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Kenyon Review Online, and The Normal School, among other publications. He currently lives in North Carolina, where he is the 2017-2018 Kenan Visiting Writer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Reviews
Praise for The Book of Resting Places

"Mira y Lopez . . . is a gifted writer. His ear for language and his ability to take ownership of ideas by finding the poetry in them . . . is the kind of thing that cannot be taught . . . It's refreshing to encounter a young writer who's chosen to do some fieldwork." --The New York Times Book Review

"The Book of Resting Places is Mira y Lopez's account of his travels, from a cemetery to a crematorium to a cryonics company . . . He's looking for the good death, somewhere, anywhere." --The New Yorker

"Thomas Mira y Lopez's debut essay collection is a finely wrought exploration of grief, mythology, history, and global death practices . . . Mira y Lopez travels far and wide . . . in search of answers." --The Guardian

"A heartfelt and personal exploration of hallowed grounds--and the history and mythology surrounding them--inspired by the sudden death of Mira y Lopez's father." --BuzzFeed
, br> "In this insightful collection of personal essays, Lopez proves a poetic, thoughtful, and at times surprisingly funny narrator in his quest for the most meaningful way to remember the dead . . . Lopez's contemplation of mortality and memory makes for a collection of quietly profound essays." --Publishers Weekly

"At one point in this debut, a researcher compares excavation to arranging a tapestry--an apt analogy for Mira y Lopez's essay collection itself . . . Each chapter alternates--or weaves--between his personal experience and history, myth, and societal practice." --Booklist

"Mira y Lopez's first book is a thoughtful, intriguing collection of 10 personal essays dealing with the dead and where they end up . . . These are wide-ranging and often tender meditations on death." --Kirkus Reviews

"It is a true pleasure to engage with a book like Thomas Mira y Lopez's . . . Coupled with his keen eye for observation and a fascinating breadth of subject matter, The Book of Resting Places becomes a refreshingly honest and critical look at death, grieving, and how burial becomes our means to remembering, and forgetting, those we've lost." --The East Bay Review

"It's a surprisingly quirky book; Mira y Lopez is honest about grief and his own imperfections, and this coherent collection of personal essays ranges from sad to downright funny." --Triangle.com

"A monumental collection . . . For all the studied excavations bound up in The Book of Resting Places, the people remembered in its pages, those passed and still with us, remain glowing torchbearers for the living." --Full Stop

"The Book of Resting Places is admirable for the restlessness and fierceness of its need to work through both its own elegy and the nature of elegies in general. From defunct cemeteries to Canaletto's genius for turning presence to absence to those museums of the self assembled by collectors or hoarders to the nature of parallax to cryonics, it's wryly deft in its associative deployment of useful metaphors in its attempt to come to terms with loss, and shame: what is the safest way to preserve the dead, and to acknowledge the love we sometimes failed to reciprocate?" --Jim Shepard, author of The World to Come and The Book of Aron

"Each place in The Book of Resting Places is haunted. But the deeper we go into Thomas Mira y Lopez's MC Escher painting of a collection, the more we realize that perhaps it is us, not the dead, who haunt the past. An excellent meditation on his father's death and his mother's preparations for her own, this book's loneliness is more than matched by its curiosity and its beauty." --Ander Monson, author of Vanishing Point

"Mira y Lopez is a stunning writer and his debut book, a tender and adventurous exploration of the intimate distances we share with the dead, deserves to be widely read. Artful sentences mirror, page after page, his artful mind. With formal intelligence and quiet wit, he has found death to be a spur to reflection and wholehearted embrace of life. This is a book to savor." --Alison Hawthorne Deming, author of Zoologies: On Animals and the Human Spirit