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A group of friends journey to aremote part of West Khasi Hills to witness Ka PhorSorat, the Feast of the Dead,an ancient Lyngngam funeral ceremony that lasts six days. Concluding with thecremation of a beloved elder, a woman whose body has been preserved in a treehouse for nine whole months, this may well be the last time Ka PhorSorat isperformed. By mistake, however, the grouparrives early. So they wait, stuck in the jungle, spendingtheir nights around a fire in the middle of a spacious hut built forthem especially, sharing stories in what proves an unexpected journey ofdiscovery. Funeral Nights is avast collection of tales both big and small, less about death than it is aboutlife in all forms. It teems with admirable men and women, raconteurs andpranksters, lovers and fools, politicians and conmen, drunks and taxi drivers;it abounds with culture, history, gods, religions, myths and legends. Inspiredby Boccaccio's Decameron and The Arabian Nights, this isintimate access to a whole world, spectacular in its documentation of a tribe'slife and culture, and lush, warm, and entirely delightful in its telling.
Losing has never been easy for a Maddox, but death always wins. Eleven years to the day after eloping with Abby in Vegas, Special Agent Travis Maddox delivers his own brand of vigilante justice to mob boss Benny Carlisi. Vegas's oldest and most violent crime family is now preparing for vengeance, and the entire Maddox family is a target. The secret Thomas and Travis have kept for a decade will be revealed to the rest of the family, and for the first time the Maddoxes will be at odds. While none of them are strangers to loss, the family has grown, and the risk is higher than ever. With brothers against brothers and wives taking sides, each member will make a choice—let the fear tear them apart, or make them stronger.
Winner of the 2005 Young Adult Fiction Award from the Association for Mormon Letters. As Kevin helps his parents with the family mortuary, his dream of working for National Geographic seems a million years away—until he and his friends are picked for a special science class at Armadillo Middle School. The class is taught by Dr. Alfred Leopold Wallace, the pompous proprietor of the local Arkansas Marsupial Museum and Discount Souvenir Outlet. Kevin’s friends aren’t keen about the doctor or his possums, but Kevin’s sure that Dr. Wallace can help him become the youngest biologist in history. All he has to do is get Dr. Wallace to notice his scientific genius! The harder Kevin tries, however, the worse his projects flop—including the midterm tarantula project that escapes and terrorizes the funeral home. The class trip to Seven Devils Swamp is Kevin’s last chance—if he doesn’t let his pride get in the way of his final project.
August 1991. In a sweltering New York City apartment, a group of Russian émigrés gathers round the deathbed of an artist named Alik, a charismatic character beloved by them all, especially the women who take turns nursing him as he fades from this world. Their reminiscences of the dying man and of their lives in Russia are punctuated by debates and squabbles: Whom did Alik love most? Should he be baptized before he dies, as his alcoholic wife, Nina, desperately wishes, or be reconciled to the faith of his birth by a rabbi who happens to be on hand? And what will be the meaning for them of the Yeltsin putsch, which is happening across the world in their long-lost Moscow but also right before their eyes on CNN? This marvelous group of individuals inhabits the first novel by Ludmila Ulitskaya to be published in English, a book that was shortlisted for the Russian Booker Prize and has been praised wherever translated editions have appeared. Simultaneously funny and sad, lyrical in its Russian sorrow and devastatingly keen in its observation of character, The Funeral Party introduces to our shores a wonderful writer who captures, wryly and tenderly, our complex thoughts and emotions confronting life and death, love and loss, homeland and exile.
"A crazy, rollicking whoop of a book, written with a poet's sensibility and deeply wacky down-home wisdom."—Lee Smith, author of The Last Girls A century after the impulsive McKinnon brothers set out to tame the Canadian wilderness and instead landed in Mattagash, Maine, their madcap legacy reigns supreme. It's 1959, and Pearl and Sicily McKinnon have gathered to plan a funeral for Marge, their older sister dying from the rare disease beriberi, thanks to her eccentric diet. Pearl, who skipped town with big-city dreams only to marry a funeral director, soon clashes with the long-suffering Sicily, who herself is coping with an unfaithful husband. To make matters worse, Sicily's teenage daughter is lusting after the town's blackest sheep, a ne'er-do-well twice her age. Brimming with darkly quirky humor and irresistible spunk, The Funeral Makers explores the inescapable ironies of American life and family dynamics and captures the spirit of a world that is as once familiar and quickly fading from view.
Frédéric Chopin’s reputation as one of the Great Romantics endures, but as Benita Eisler reveals in her elegant and elegiac biography, the man was more complicated than his iconic image. A classicist, conservative, and dandy who relished his conquest of Parisian society, the Polish émigré was for a while blessed with genius, acclaim, and the love of Europe’s most infamous woman writer, George Sand. But by the age of 39, the man whose brilliant compositions had thrilled audiences in the most fashionable salons lay dying of consumption, penniless and abandoned by his lover. In the fall of 1849, his lavish funeral was attended by thousands—but not by George Sand. In this intimate portrait of an embattled man, Eisler tells the story of a turbulent love affair, of pain and loss redeemed by art, and of worlds—both private and public—convulsed by momentous change.
Contemporary forms of living and dying in Swaziland cannot be understood apart from the global HIV/AIDS pandemic, according to anthropologist Casey Golomski. In Africa's last absolute monarchy, the story of 15 years of global collaboration in treatment and intervention is also one of ordinary people facing the work of caring for the sick and dying and burying the dead. Golomski's ethnography shows how AIDS posed challenging questions about the value of life, culture, and materiality to drive new forms and practices for funerals. Many of these forms and practicesnewly catered funeral feasts, an expanded market for life insurance, and the kingdom's first crematoriumare now conspicuous across the landscape and culturally disruptive in a highly traditionalist setting. This powerful and original account details how these new matters of death, dying, and funerals have become entrenched in peoples' everyday lives and become part of a quest to create dignity in the wake of a devastating epidemic.