From the best-selling How We Die by Sherwin Nuland to our fascination with serial murders, from the AIDS epidemic to the concerns of our aging population, America continues to express a widespread curiosity about death and dying. In The Grim Reader, editors Maura Spiegel and Richard Tristman have gathered the best of the new writings on the subject of death along with classic statements on mortality to produce an essential resource for the heart and mind.

Historians tell us that death was once a public experience, circumscribed by religious ceremony, that gradually disappeared as our medical ability to forestall it grew more confident. This clinical capacity to mediate death-to postpone it with machines, to relieve its pain and suffering-has made it once more a public subject. Though death remains inevitable, denial, taboo, and shame have been banished in favor of reflection, candor, mutual aid, and acceptance. In their personal reckonings with death, these writers and thinkers wrestle with the indomitable fact, discover emotional insights and methods of coping unknown to them before the crisis of terminal illness. And in poems, eulogies, private expressions of love and loss, letters of condolences, we find inspiration and solace.

From the reflections of Grace Paley on the death of her mother to Jessica Mitford's sociology of American funeral customs, from Freud's musing on the transience of life to Milan Kundera's story of laughter at a funeral, The Grim Reader offers a fresh and unmediated encounter with mortality and its many dimensions."

Narrative medicine is a fresh discipline of health care that helps patients and health professionals to tell and listen to the complex and unique stories of illness. The Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine expresses the collective experience and discoveries of the originators of the field. Arising at Columbia University in 2000 from roots in the humanities and patient-centered care, narrative medicine draws patients, doctors, nurses, therapists, and health activists together to re-imagine a health care based on trust and trustworthiness, humility, and mutual recognition. Over a decade of education and research has crystallized the goals and methods of narrative medicine, leading to increasingly powerful means to improve the care that patients receive. The methods described in this book harness creativity and insight to help the professionals in being with patients, not just to diagnose and treat them but to bear witness to what they undergo. Narrative medicine training in literary theory, philosophy, narrative ethics, and the creative arts increases clinicians' capacity to perceive the turmoil and suffering borne by patients and to help them to cohere or endure the chaos of illness. Narrative medicine has achieved an international reputation and reach. Many health care settings adopt methods of narrative medicine in teaching and practice. Through the Master of Science in Narrative Medicine graduate program and health professions school curricula at Columbia University, more and more clinicians and scholars have obtained the rigorous training necessary to practice and teach narrative medicine. This text is offered to all who seek the opportunity for disciplined training in narrative medicine. By clearly articulating our principles and practice, this book provides the standards of the field for those who want to join us in seeking authenticity, recognition, affiliation, and justice in a narrative health care.

The vital synergy between dress and the cinema has been in place since the advent of film. Broaching topics such as vampires, noir, and Marie Antoinette looks, Fashion in Film uncovers the way in which the alliance of these two powerhouse industries use myriad cultural influences shaping narrative, national identity, and all points in between. Contributor essays address international films from early cinema to the present, drawing on the classic and the innovative. This abundantly illustrated collection reveals that fashion in conjunction with film must be understood in a different way from fashion tout simple."