"Lynch has added another chapter to one of the most memorable records in American letters."—William Giraldi, New York Times Book ReviewThese stories are linked by the gone and not forgotten: former spouses, dead parents, missing children. Lynch creates a world in which people searching for connection and old comforts find them both near at hand and oddly out of reach.

“[Lynch] brings the lessons of death to life, and turns life and death into art.” —Time Out New YorkHere is the voice of both witness and functionary. Lynch stands between “the living and the living who have died” with outrage and amazement, awe and calm, straining for the brief glimpse we all get of what mortality means to a vital species.

**Foreword by Alan Ball“Elegant, respectful and refreshingly funny.” —New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice**For nearly four decades, poet, essayist, and small-town funeral director Thomas Lynch has probed relations between the literary and mortuary arts with a signature blend of memoir, meditation, gallows humor, and poetic precision. The Depositions offers a wry and compassionate selection from Lynch’s four previous collections of nonfiction, along...

"A good read even for those who have not the least ancestral or national bias—for those who desire civilized entertainment along with brilliant narrative." —Seattle TimesIn thirty-five years and dozens of return trips to Ireland, Thomas Lynch has found a template for the larger world inside the small one, the planet in the local parish. Part memoir, part cultural study, Booking Passage is a brilliant, often comedic guidebook for those "fellow trav...

An aged trade embalmer discovers a new connection to life. As a husband, he promised his dying wife he’d write their story of love and grief, sweetness, sadness. Twenty-five years later, he may not have a first sentence for the story of their marriage but he does have the start of a loving final chapter of his own.If sex and the dead, as Yeats instructed, are topics worthy of a serious mind, then Doyle Shields has a very serious mind indeed. His professional work w...

An aged trade embalmer discovers a new connection to life. As a husband, he promised his dying wife he’d write their story of love and grief, sweetness, sadness. Twenty-five years later, he may not have a first sentence for the story of their marriage but he does have the start of a loving final chapter of his own.If sex and the dead, as Yeats instructed, are topics worthy of a serious mind, then Doyle Shields has a very serious mind indeed. His professional work w...

A selection of the very best from one of America’s most thought-provoking writers: poems on life, faith, doubt, and death that read like memoir, essay, and story. As The New York Times said, “likely to resonate with many who have come face to face with life’s most important questions.”Thomas Lynch—like Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams—is a poet who writes about real things with language rooted in the everyday yet masterfully infused with power:

A selection of the very best from one of America’s most thought-provoking writers: poems on life, faith, doubt, and death that read like memoir, essay, and story. As The New York Times said, “likely to resonate with many who have come face to face with life’s most important questions.”Thomas Lynch—like Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams—is a poet who writes about real things with language rooted in the everyday yet masterfully infused with power:

In the first book of its kind specifically for Catholics, theologian, spiritual director, and social worker Sr. Mary Petrosky, F.M.M., shows how a spiritual will—a document that outlines your values, intentions, and hopes for the future—can help you focus on what’s most important in your life. As you grow older, it will be something you’ll want to share with those you love.The Journey Never Ends guides you through the process of preparing a spiritual will as an ex...

Featuring scholars at the forefront of contemporary political theology and the study of German Idealism, Nothing Absolute explores the intersection of these two flourishing fields. Against traditional approaches that view German Idealism as a secularizing movement, this volume revisits it as the first fundamentally philosophical articulation of the political-theological problematic in the aftermath of the Enlightenment and the advent of secularity.Nothing Absolute...

This book is intended to help fill some of the technical and policy information gaps identified earlier as sources constraining further development of high speed rail (HSR) systems in the US. It addresses the key aspects of planning, development and implementation of HSR systems.

Our bodies all have stories to tell - and who better to tell them than fifteen of the world's finest writers?Buried beneath layers of flesh, our hearts pump, our lungs inflate, our kidneys filter. These organs, and others, are essential to our survival but remain largely unknown to us.In Beneath the Skin, fifteen writers each explore a different body part: Naomi Alderman unravels the intestines and our obsession with food; Thomas Lynch celebrates t...