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How Best To Avoid Dying: Stories (2014)

by Owen Egerton(Favorite Author)

4.06 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

1593765223 (ISBN13: 9781593765224)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

Soft Skull Press

review 1: Owen Egerton is a novelist and a screenwriter known for his dark, satirical humor. His work often touches on religion, as evidenced by his last two novels, The Book of Harold, a modern-day gospel narrative, and Everyone Says That at the End of the World, which riffs on the Judeo-Christian eschatology of the end times.In this glossy reprint of his first short story collection, How Best to Avoid Dying, lost souls search for meaning in both life and death. In “The Martyrs of Mountain Peak,” counselors at an evangelical summer camp schedule their own deaths to look like gruesome accidents in order to increase the number of campers who will “come to Jesus” in their grief. And in “Lazarus Dying,” John the Apostle and Lazarus continue to live in the 21st Century, work... moreing in a copy shop, blessed (or cursed) with immortality by Christ.The Chicago Tribune says “Egerton is hardly the first to suggest that attention to the raw minutiae of beauty is the closest we get to grace. But he’s the funniest to do so in a long time.” I say there is much we as writers can learn from Dying about our craft.
review 2: I started reading this and couldn't stop thinking "This is really weird. What is going on? What. What. Why. What." and then upon continued exposure realized it's charming weird and I love these stories. SO much. Very much. I also literally COL-ed (chuckled outloud) multiple times. (To be clear, I'm not sure why I didn't predict the oddity...there is a creepy baby doll on the front cover, and throughout the book, after all) less

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