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| Acknowledgments | |
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| Preface | |
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| Reckonings | |
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| Wrestling With the Fact | |
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| Sigmund Freud: On Transience | |
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| Bertolt Brecht: On His Mortality | |
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| Michel De Montaigne: To Philosophize Is to Learn to Die | |
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| Thomas Nagel: Death | |
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| C. P. Cavafy: The Horses of Achilles | |
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| Vladimir Nabokov: Speak, Memory | |
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| Being Brave and Being Scared | |
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| Philip Larkin: Aubade | |
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| Paul Zweig: Departures | |
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| John Keats: Sonnet | |
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| Marguerite Yourcenar: With Open Eyes | |
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| Adam Smith: On the Death of David Hume | |
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| William Hazlitt: On the Fear of Death | |
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| Robert Louis Stevenson: Aes Triplex | |
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| Time to Be Old | |
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| A. R. Ammons: From Garbage | |
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| Samuel Clemens: On Old Age | |
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| Luis Benuel: Swan Song | |
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| Kingley Amis: Lovely | |
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| Philip Larkin: The Old Fools | |
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| What Words Are There? | |
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| Left Behind | |
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| Paul Auster: Portrait of an Invisible Man | |
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| Donald Justice: Sonnet to My Father | |
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| Colette: He Died in His Seventy-Fourth Year | |
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| Alvin Feinman: True Night | |
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| Emily Dickinson: Poems and a Letter | |
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| Sharon Olds: The Death of Marilyn Monroe | |
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| One Fight More | |
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| Sir Thomas Browne: Religio Medici | |
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| James Merrill: An Upward Look | |
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| Simone De Beauvoir: A Very Easy Death | |
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| Nicole Loraux: A Woman's Suicide for a Man's Death | |
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| Sons and Daughters | |
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| Grace Paley: Mother | |
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| James Baldwin: Notes of a Native Son | |
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| Philip Roth: Patrimony | |
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| Anne Sexton: The Child-Bearers | |
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| Elizabeth Rosen: My Mother's Death | |
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| Give Death the Crown: War, Pestilence, Genocide | |
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| In Its Midst | |
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| Jasper Griffin: On Epic Death | |
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| Alan Moorehead: Gallipoli | |
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| Giovanni Boccaccio: The Plague in London | |
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| Samuel Pepys: The Plague in London | |
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| Primo Levi: October 1944 | |
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| Robert Jay Lifton: Immersion in Death | |
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| Our Plague: Aids | |
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| Emmanuel Dreuilhe: Mortal Embrace | |
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| Thom Gunn: Terminal | |
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| Paul Monette: 3275 | |
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| Making Arrangements | |
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| The "Formal Feeling": Rites and Ritual | |
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| Emily Vermeule: A Very Active Dead | |
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| Geoffrey Gorer: Death, Grief, and Mourning in Contemporary Britain | |
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| Sheila Awooner-Renner: I Desperately Needed to See My Son | |
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| George Bernard Shaw: On the Cremation of His Mother | |
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| Richard Selzer: Remains | |
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| Death Cultures | |
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| Philippe Aries: The Modern Cemetery | |
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| Jessica Mitford: The American Way of Death | |
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| Rudolf Schafer: Photographing the Dead | |
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| Roland Barthes: Camera Lucida | |
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| Siegried Giedion: The Mechanization of Death | |
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| Erwin Panofsky: The Dangerous Dead | |
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| Legacies | |
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| E. A. J. Honigmann: The Second-Best Bed | |
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| Carlos M. N. Eire: From Madrid to Purgatory | |
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| Death Issues | |
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| Final Care | |
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| George Orwell: How the Poor Die | |
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| Anne Munley: The Hospice Alternative | |
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| Jospeh A. Califano: Death Management | |
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| Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide | |
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| Timothy Quill: The Burdens of Aggressive Medical Treatment | |
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| Ronald Dworkin: Life's Dominion | |
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| Michael Burleigh: "Euthanasia" In Germany | |
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| A Healthy Distance | |
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| Samuel Beckett: Malone Dies | |
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| Stanley Elkin: The Beginning of the (Living)Dead | |
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| Monty Python: The Dead Parrot | |
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| Milan Kundera: Graveside Laughter | |
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| Recapitulation | |
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| William Shakespeare: Hamlet: The Graveyard | |