Love and Other Ways of Dying: Essays

LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD In this moving, lyrical, and ultimately uplifting collection of essays, Michael Paterniti turns a keen eye on the full range of human experience, introducing us to an unforgettable cast of everyday people.   Michael Paterniti is one of the most original and empathic storytellers working today. His writing has been described as humane, devastating, and beautiful by Elizabeth Gilbert, spellbinding by Anthony Doerr, and expansive and joyful by George Saunders. In the seventeen wide-ranging essays collected for the first time in Love and Other Ways of Dying, he brings his full literary powers to bear, pondering happiness and grief, memory and the redemptive power of human connection.   In the remote Ukranian countryside, Paterniti picks apples and faces mortality with a real-life giant in Nanjing, China, he confronts a distraught jumper on a suicide bridge in Dodge City, Kansas, he takes up residence at a roadside hotel and sees, firsthand, the ways in which the racial divide turns neighbor against neighbor.