Philip Wardman has a neurotic fear of violence and death. He falls in love with Senta Pelham, who is just the opposite. She is fascinated with death and tells Philip to prove his love for her by commiting murder.

Inga is a poet. She wants to buy and restore a house she is drawn to that reminds her of her childhood home, but her distant husband Hermann sees little value in it or many of the things Inga loves. Her crumbling marrigae is a stark contrast to the relationship that she shares with her 8-year-old daughter, with whom she shares her hopes, fears and inner-most thoughts following her recovery from breast cancer. By day their lives seem magical, but at...

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, twenty 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;...

Based on his own memories and those of his philosopher brother, a memoir about the author's family offers a meditation on the inevitability of human mortality and the fear of death, a celebration of art, and an argument for, against, about, and with God.