About this title: Realistic, and often cynical, these epitaphs are spoken from the grave by a collection of two hundred and forty four people buried in a village cemetery in America's Midwest. The whole spectrum of human life is represented here; with everyone from poet to shopkeeper given a chance to narrate their life, and tell of their thwarted hopes and dreams; ...
read more
Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Collier Books, New York
Date Published: 1969
Description: Very good. No dust jacket as issued. Slight cover and edgewear. Pages unmarked, except for former price on first page. 318 p. 18 cm. Collier books; AS381. Classic.. read more
"This book changed the way I look at life. I picked it up for the first time a few weeks after my father died, and reading through it comforted me and helped me understand. By the time I reached to poem titled "Lucinda Matlock" I was ready to move on and live my own life again. I don't know if it could effect anyone else this way but for reasons of my own, this book will always mean a great deal to me."
"We read selections from this in English and I was like "Whoa this is a cool and eclectic mix of epitaphs written by themselves." I get the book and realize that it's not an eclectic mix it's just one unrealistically depressing epitaph after another of people having affairs and lieing all the time and I'm like "OK no town is this depressing." It just got repeptive and sameish. If it was 20 pages shorter it would have been better, but it was just overkill of the same basic idea over and over again."
"The dead have no secrets in this book. Masters captures in just a few lines each person's identity. What they say and how they say it is the minimalist characterization for each name in succession. Verses not written in rhyme, just giving a brief glimpse of insight into each corpses thoughts. The ways that the deceased townsfolk are interconnected are often surprising-clashes emphasized by the fact that they all end up buried right next to their neighbors in life. Brilliant!"
"I really enjoyed this. I was attracted to it as an example of a populist experimental narrative form... over 200 verse monologues of dead people buried together in a small-town cemetery. It was a best seller in 1914 or so. Not something I necessarily expected to read all the way through, but it caught me up and won my attention away from a couple other books I was reading simultaneously. Then made me pick up a little Whitman after I was done.
Great sense of the small-town Midwest in its golden age... even after a lifetime of being bombarded by Christmas movies sentimentalizing small towns (and growing up in a suburb that dressed itself up like one) I managed to find new appreciation for how egalitarian and locally rooted and in touch with nature that now-ancient civilization was, at least in its ideal, at least for the white dudes who are generally the main characters in this book. There's also a lot in here about bank busts, which is nice reading for the present moment... I guess they were natural facts of life (though still as cataclysmic as death) for people in that era, and it was sort of in the common experience to have to totally reconceive of one's class and lifestyle after being ruined by something outside one's own power. The serene beyond-the-grave perspective is a nice medicine for all the anxiety circulating right now among people who have no experiential reference for this sort of thing.
The two epilogues are kind of bad and unnecessary, but they don't really matter."
We guarantee every item's condition, as described on Alibris. If you are not satisfied that an item is as described, return your purchase for a refund.
rating
