Winik - The Big Book of the Dead

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The Big Book of the Dead

Marion Winik

COUNTERPOINT

BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA

Praise for The Baltimore Book of the Dead

Spending time with dead people might make you wonder: Do I want to take this trip? You do, when Winik is telling the stories, two-page hits that read like flash nonfiction, highlight reels of what these people have meant to her, and sometimes to American culture, over the past 60 years... Winiks voice is strong and clear, as if she has been called to sing these paeans and she will do it, shes honored to do it, but shes going to do it her way, with elation and sadness.

NANCY ROMMELMANN, Newsday

Feast on Marion Winiks jewelbox of a book filled with gold nuggets of prose and a fevered passion for life even though much is an homage to death itself. Every sentence is a carefully considered slam dunk... Breathless, heartbreaking, invigorating.

Literary Hub

With the same candid and humorous writing style she fine-tuned through her years as an All Things Considered commentator, Winik memorializes the departed in short essays that evoke a tender sense of connection in readers.

LAUREN LAROCCA, Baltimore

Every so often I stumble across books where my first reaction is regret. How have I never heard of this writer? My second reaction is a hunger to read all he or she has written. This does not happen often enough, so please know I do not toss this sort of praise lightly. Marion Winik is one of the most elegant, evocative and incisive writers I have encountered... Her gift is using the fewest words to capture their spirits, and though as the title broadcasts, this is a book about the dead, it is a glorious account of living.

JACQELINE CUTLER, The Star-Ledger (Newark, NJ)

Empathy figures in Marion Winiks The Baltimore Book of the Dead (Counterpoint, Oct.), along with her sharp eye and wicked wit. This sequel to The Glen Rock Book of the Dead has more achingly beautiful and succinct obituaries of the people (and a few pets) from Winiks wide, idiosyncratic circle of family, friends, colleagues, lovers, and enemies.

Library Journal, Editors Pick

In writing about these dozens of deaths, the author is writing about life in general, how quickly it can change and how long a memory can persist, and her life in particular, how big ideas about art and revolution were so easily infected with the stupid romance of self-destruction... Insightful pieces with a cumulative impact.

Kirkus Reviews

[An] unconventional though captivating blend of memoir and biography... Throughout these understated portraits, Winik writes with a delightfully light and nuanced hand.

Publishers Weekly

This slim, deeply moving book is full of elegies that bear witness to the departed and remind us of the beauty and pain and complexity in every life, no matter how obscure. Marion Winiks prose is deceptively rich, suffused with quiet emotion and tender humor. She teaches us how to remember.

TOM PERROTTA, author of The Leftovers and Mrs. Fletcher

Marion Winiks writing is always a wild and true marvel and never more so than in her latest work, The Baltimore Book of the Dead. With riveting compassion, she looks at all the love and the pain and the detritus that accumulates in the corners of all of our lives and pieces together something sad and lovely and new out of it.

BILL CLEGG, author of Did You Ever Have a Family

Marion Winik is such an excellent writer that you will want to gobble up The Baltimore Book of the Dead, but you wont. After each chapter, you will pause and take a breath. You will have experienced the life and death of a stranger made friend, made familiar, through Winiks compassionate genius. Savor every word.

ABIGAIL THOMAS, author of What Comes Next and How to Like It

Praise for The Glen Rock Book of the Dead

Winik has many gifts as a writer, but one I appreciate the most is her ability to write about the hardest, darkest subjects with a light, knowing hand. Situations are bleak, but life is not. Life is hard and hilarious and good and complex and often, entirely inexplicable. Winik shows us that in this book. I love The Glen Rock Book of the Dead. I think you will too.

CHERYL STRAYED, author of Wild

Although shes known many people who died young, in sad or unsavory ways, the book is uplifting, funny and deep. This is partly because Winik resists the temptation to be overly reverent or poetic, though there are plenty of graceful passages. Her fascinating, tiny tributes tell the bare-assed truth about relationships while coming together to create a portrait of Winiks own imperfect, love-filled life.

MARCIA MENTER, More

Winik offers memoir, prose and warmthexpressed with precise evocative details.

DIANE SCHARPER, The Baltimore Sun

The Glen Rock Book of the Dead is a quiet tour de force from former Austinite Marion Winik.

MIKE SHEA, Texas Monthly

I only hope that Winik will continue to write, and share her insightful stories with the world. If that requires her to use a sixth sense, talk to dead people, reminisce old times, I wont be one to judge.

JESS KROUT, The Evening Sun (Hanover, PA)

The truth, so tragic and so exhilarating, is the gift Marion Winik offers up with honesty and compassion in this incomparable book.

HARVEY FREEDENBERG, Sunday Patriot-News (Harrisburg, PA)

To say there has never been a book like this doesnt begin to get at my admiration for what Winik does hereIm dazzled by the highwire act of her writing, her willingness to go deep and then go deeper, and her immense wisdom about life.

JESSE KORNBLUTH, Head Butler

Death comes, they say, like a thief in the night. It comes for all of us; if were lucky, there is a Marion Winik in our lives to document who we were and what we meant as we cool our heels in the VIP lounge of the afterlife. We all deserve it, and, as evidenced by this book, no one knows that more keenly than Marion Winik.

MELANIE HAUPT, The Austin Chronicle

The Big Book of the Dead

ALSO BY MARION WINIK

The Baltimore Book of the Dead

The Glen Rock Book of the Dead

Highs in the Low Fifties

Above Us Only Sky

The Lunch-Box Chronicles

First Comes Love

Telling

BoyCrazy

Nonstop

The Big Book of the Dead

Copyright 2019 by Marion Winik

First paperback edition: 2019

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Part I opener image Istock/tapilipa

Part II opener image Istock/Jeanna Draw

Part III opener image Istock/tapilipa

Part IV opener image Istock/thedafkish

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Winik, Marion, author. | Winik, Marion. Glen Rock book of the dead. | Winik, Marion. Baltimore book of the dead.

Title: The big book of the dead / Marion Winik.

Description: First paperback edition. | Berkeley, California : Counterpoint, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019007850 | ISBN 9781640092532

Subjects: LCSH: Winik, MarionAnecdotes. | Winik, MarionFriends and associatesAnecdotes. | DeathAnecdotes. | Curiosities and wonders. | Glen Rock (Pa.)Biography. | Baltimore (Md.)Biography. | New JerseyBiography. | Austin (Tex.)Biography. | New Orleans (La.)Biography.