Death To Dust

In our culture, we rarely speak about death -- partly because it is seen as a sort of pornography, shrouded in indecency and immersed in taboos; and partly because we know so little about it. Yet nearly everyone at some point has questions about what happens after death. At long last, here is a book to answer many of those questions: What physical changes occur to a dead body?

Death: From Dust to Destiny, featuring a rich collection of texts and images together with the authors' guiding commentary, offers a reflective meditation on the methods that artists, architects, and writers have developed to activate memory, and animate their subjects into a-possibly-unending afterlife.

A revealing look at how death and burial practices influence the living Dust to Dust offers a three-hundred-year history of Jewish life in New York, literally from the ground up. Taking Jewish cemeteries as its subject matter, it follows the ways that Jewish New Yorkers have planned for death and burial from their earliest arrival in New Amsterdam to the twentieth century. Allan Amanik charts a remarkable reciprocity among Jewish funerary provisions and the workings of family and communal life, tracing how financial and family concerns in death came to equal earlier priorities rooted in tradition and communal cohesion. At the same time, he shows how shifting emphases in death gave average Jewish families the ability to advocate for greater protections and entitlements such as widows’ benefits and funeral insurance. Amanik ultimately concludes that planning for life’s end helps to shape social systems in ways that often go unrecognized.

Seventy per cent of British families now choose cremation for their funerals, a rapid change in traditional death customs. This is the first book to investigate why cremation replaced burial. It examines the political, religious, economic and social reasons behind personal choice and sets them in a European context. This study is doubly timely with the expanding scholarly interest in death studies, and the new media interest in the British way of death.

What happens between death and life can change a girl. Jessie is a zombie. And this is her story . . . Nine years ago, Jessie was in a car crash and died. After she was buried, she awoke and tore through the earth to arise, reborn, as a zombie. And there are others--gangs of undead roaming the Indiana woods, fighting, hunting, hidden. But when a mysterious illness threatens the existence of both zombies and humans, Jessie must decide whether to stay and fight or flee to survive . . .

From a breathtaking new voice, a novel about a splintered family in Kenya—a story of power and deceit, unrequited love, survival and sacrifice. Odidi Oganda, running for his life, is gunned down in the streets of Nairobi. His grief-stricken sister, Ajany, just returned from Brazil, and their father bring his body back to their crumbling home in the Kenyan drylands, seeking some comfort and peace. But the murder has stirred memories long left untouched and unleashed a series of unexpected events: Odidi and Ajany’s mercurial mother flees in a fit of rage; a young Englishman arrives at the Ogandas’ house, seeking his missing father; a hardened policeman who has borne witness to unspeakable acts reopens a cold case; and an all-seeing Trader with a murky identity plots an overdue revenge. In scenes stretching from the violent upheaval of contemporary Kenya back through a shocking political assassination in 1969 and the Mau Mau uprisings against British colonial rule in the 1950s, we come to learn the secrets held by this parched landscape, buried deep within the shared past of the family and of a conflicted nation. Here is a spellbinding novel about a brother and sister who have lost their way; about how myths come to pass, history is written, and war stains us forever.

In this milestone work, leading social critic Os Guinness provides a wide-ranging analysis of one of the most pivotal decades in Western history, the 1960s. Examining secular humanism, the technological society, and the counterculture, Guinness argues that Westerners need a Third Way found only in the rediscovery and revival of the historic Christian faith.

No one thinks straight. At least no one remembers straight. But ten years ago, things were different, weren’t they? Roland Barthes once wrote that color in a photograph is like make-up on a corpse. No one is fooled. In anarchic denial of convenient truths, a young international couple meet and marry on a small Mediterranean island. Ten years later, the couple separate in part due to complications with immigration laws. Following this transcontinental rupture, fragmented histories emerge in response to the woman’s encounters with a series of color snapshots. There is death here, familiar to the mourner, as the photographs issue their special powers to magically and auspiciously predict the future and simultaneously to permit the return of the dead. The woman recognizes pieces of herself as past objects indexed within photographic stills, but paradoxically, she is present, outside in this chaos trying not to fall apart. The images and their objects yawn to remind us of the reluctant destiny of all our beloved memories, bodies, and things: that is, to disintegrate. Borrowing its title from a passage in The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald, Closer to Dust is a séance, a gathering of invitees: inherently biased elegies, the images that conjured them, and the reader- viewer in attendance who is warmly invited to order these intimate fragments into cohesion.

Wool introduced the world of the silo. Shift told the story of its creation. Dust will describe its downfall.

Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s irresistible and infamous novel The Dirty Dust is consistently ranked as the most important prose work in modern Irish, yet no translation for English-language readers has ever before been published. Alan Titley’s vigorous new translation, full of the brio and guts of Ó Cadhain’s original, at last brings the pleasures of this great satiric novel to the far wider audience it deserves. In The Dirty Dust all characters lie dead in their graves. This, however, does not impair their banter or their appetite for news of aboveground happenings from the recently arrived. Told entirely in dialogue, Ó Cadhain’s daring novel listens in on the gossip, rumors, backbiting, complaining, and obsessing of the local community. In the afterlife, it seems, the same old life goes on beneath the sod. Only nothing can be done about it—apart from talk. In this merciless yet comical portrayal of a closely bound community, Ó Cadhain remains keenly attuned to the absurdity of human behavior, the lilt of Irish gab, and the nasty, deceptive magic of human connection.