Una memoria extraordinariamente íntima de las experiencias cercanas a la muerte que han convertido a Maggie O'Farrell en la mujer y la escritora que es hoy. Una enfermedad infantil que no se esperaba que sobreviviera. Un anhelo adolescente de escapar que casi termina en desastre. Un encuentro aterrador en un camino remoto. Un trabajo de parto mal administrado en un hospital con poco personal. Esta es una memoria con una diferencia: diecisiete encuentros...

"The story of the USS Indianapolis is well-known. After delivering crucial components of the atomic bomb that would level Hiroshima in 1945, the Indianapolis was sunk by a Japanese submarine in the South China Sea. Of the nearly 1,200 men aboard, 900 survived the torpedoing, spilling into the sea. White tip sharks began attacking the next morning and after four days only 300 sailors were alive to rescue. Less famous are the many stories of ships sinking...

"Like Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, an extraordinarily moving and engaging look at loss and death. Eve Joseph is an award-winning poet who worked for twenty years as a palliative care counselor in a hospice. When she was a young girl, she lost a much older brother, and her experience as a grown woman helping others face death, dying, and grief opens the path for her to recollect and understand his loss in a way she could not as a child....

When Pushcart publisher Bill Henderson entered his 80s, he was blessed with identical twin grandsons. He began thinking about what he wanted to say to them after he was gone and they came of age. Influenced by the letters of Flannery O'Connor, he started writing to the boys, telling them about his life and mining it for whatever wisdom he had gleaned along the way. He intended the letters for private circulation but at the urging of friends, he has...