Showing results for "Fiction" in Death & Dying

"It takes an entire lifetime to learn how to die", wrote the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca (c. 4 BC-65 AD). He counseled readers to "study death always", and took his own advice, returning to the subject again and again in all his writings, yet he never treated it in a complete work. How to Die gathers in one volume, for the first time, Seneca's remarkable meditations on death and dying. Edited and translated by James S. Romm, How to Die reveals a provocative thinker who speaks with a startling frankness about the need to accept death or even, under certain conditions, to seek it out.

Deu anys després de la mort del seu pare, el narrador d'aquest llibre decideix escriure-la. Amb l'ombra del suïcidi que priva el dol, es pregunta: és possible trobar les paraules d'un comiat que no es va produir? Així, aquest relat personal i íntim esdevé una recerca per entendre com es forgen els vincles familiars, a què condemna el silenci, on s'amaga la veritat d'una història. Però l'escriptura falla, i l'autor recorre a les biografies d'escriptors que es van suïcidar i a les seves darreres notes per reconstruir un adeu possible, temptatiu.

Worldwide, more people die by suicide than by murder, and many more are left behind to grieve. Despite distressing statistics that show suicide rates rising, the subject, long a taboo, is infrequently talked about. In this sweeping intellectual and cultural history, poet and historian Jennifer Michael Hecht channels her grief for two friends lost to suicide into a search for history’s most persuasive arguments against the irretrievable act, arguments she hopes to bring back into public consciousness.

¿Quién no ha sentido, al menos una vez en la vida, el deseo de alejarse del mundo? ¿Quién no ha soñado con dejarlo todo y desaparecer? La tentación de la huida, el motivo de la fuga mundi, es recurrente en nuestra cultura porque permanece vivo a lo largo de la historia, y siempre provoca una mezcla de fascinación, nostalgia y callado remordimiento. Para seguir su rastro, de la huida al desierto predicada en el siglo IV por el eremitismo cristiano al exaltado elogio de la evasión entonado por los hippies de la década de 1960, el sociólogo Rémy Oudghiri se ha deshecho de las herramientas habituales de su oficio.

Drawing on the author’s seven years of caring for his mother through Alzheimer's, Be With: Letters to a Caregiver is what its title promises: four dispatches to an anonymous long-term caregiver. In brief passages that cast fresh light on what it means to live with dementia, Barnes shares trials, insights, solace - and, ultimately, inspiration.

How to Die is both an absorbing excursion through some of Western literature’s most compelling works on the subject of death as well as an anecdote-driven argument for cultivating a better understanding of death in the belief that, if we do, we’ll know more about what it means to live a meaningful life.

Three men, Kevin, Dermot and Joe, stand and tell their stories on a bare stage. They never meet. Or do they? From this simplest of dramatic devices emerges a rounded tale of Irish life across the generations, accurate and poignant and therefore unforgettable: The poetry of ordinary life.