Sean Virgo

This collection of ten stories by one of Canada's foremost fiction writers is designed to be a bedside book for people living with death.

In his challenging, affirmative introduction Seán Virgo suggests: “We prepare best for death, surely by loving life.” He refuses to accept the taboos and terrors which Western societies have erected around death: “Dying people are vitally concerned with life, if they're allowed. They are not lepers, or saints, or objects. And if they need stories about Death, too, it must be because the folklore of Death has withered, gone down in the twentieth-century with so many other dialects. Even humour, mankind's dance with taboo, has failed in this area for most of us. And with that dialect has been lost the sense of relationship with the dead that I've envied in older cultures.”

These stories express the full range of that dialect, from heartbreak to raunchy comedy, with more than a few speculations about what lies across the border of "the undiscovered country". Each story is prefaced with an intimate personal account of how it came to be written, and what it now means to the author.