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Reviews:
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"Spoon River Anthology as told by a female Jack Kerouac."
"Winik offers memoir, prose and warmth – expressed with precise evocative details."
"The Glen Rock Book of the Dead is a quiet tour de force from former Austinite Marion Winik."
"I only hope that Winik will continue to write, and share her insightful stories with the world. If that requires her to use a sixth sense, talk to dead people, reminisce old times, I won't be one to judge."
"Few among us, when we die, will be lucky enough to be eulogized as intriguingly as the individuals in Marion Winik's The Glen Rock Book of the Dead. The slender and elegantly illustrated volume chronicles the stories of some 50 individuals the author once knew, compressing their lives and personal significance into brief, two-page essays.
The eighth book from this critically acclaimed writer and poet is a sort of modern-day version of Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology—the almost century-old classic that told the tale of a town in the voices of its deceased."
"The truth, so tragic and so exhilarating, is the gift Marion Winik offers up with honesty and compassion in this incomparable book."
"If you have read First Comes Love—Winik's memoir about her marriage to a gay man and his death from AIDS—you may imagine what you are in for: equal parts laceration and exhilaration, 100% brilliance. To say there has never been a book like this doesn't begin to get at my admiration for what Winik does here—I'm dazzled by the highwire act of her writing, her willingness to go deep and then go deeper, and her immense wisdom about life. ...If you have the guts to read this book—easily the most powerful document I've read in years—you will almost surely make your own list of the lost. You can't not. The Glen Rock Book of the Dead is that haunting, that beautiful, that necessary."
"Much of literature is elegiac in nature. Much of Winik's propulsive, come-clean writing has been about
coping with loss. So it makes sense that her newest essay collection comprises tributes to her dead. Glen
Rock is the quiet place she lives; Spoon River Anthology was her template. Bold and funny, Winik is the
queen of pithiness and punch, and the micro-lives she has created here are far more difficult to forge than
their brevity and blithe tone might suggest. Each family member, friend, lover, or neighbor is identified by
occupation, temperament, obsession, or curse, such as The Art Star, The Junkie, The Mah Jongg Player,
The Bad Influence. And each portrait is a window onto some aspect of Winik’s life, one that has
been pitted and torn by deaths accidental, suicidal, and simply tragic, including many due to AIDS. It is a
fine and noble act to remember the dead as Winik has with candor, bemusement, and sorrow, and her
gracefully crafted miniatures will inspire others to summon memories of their own lost ones."
"Alongside the numerous deaths from AIDS and the poignant lament that there are no gay couples of Winik's generation, there is a house ravaged by Katrina, a soldier lost in Iraq, the World Trade Center, Winik imbuing each departed with a dignity and grace everyone deserves in death but might not have had in life. ...Death comes, they say, like a thief in the night. It comes for all of us; if we're lucky, there is a Marion Winik in our lives to document who we were and what we meant as we cool our heels in the VIP lounge of the afterlife. We all deserve it, and, as evidenced by this book, no one knows that more keenly than Marion Winik."
"Oh, I have not been so captivated by a book in a long, long time!! I read it cover to cover without pause; and laughed and cried and revisited my own storehouse of ghosts with increasing tenderness. In chapters limited to two to six paragraphs each, Winik lauds the dead with whom she connected in life. These aren't chapters as one is accustomed to; not even essays, in that they are so spare. In recommending this book to everyone I bump into (my mother, the grocer, joggers who pass me on the city bridges!), I keep referring to the chapters as mini portraits, flamboyantly colored edges of a burned or shredded masterpiece that hint at the majesty we'll never again see fully. How Winik crammed such wisdom into so few words, I do not know. As an author myself, this work earns the highest and most enviable praise I can summon: How I wish I had written this brilliant little book myself!"
"I read this book in one sitting. It's so beautiful, sad, interesting, funny, and true that I simply could not put it down.
This is one cool book. Each chapter is about a dead person the author knew. The chapters are short and intense and riveting and beautifully written. Winik has many gifts as a writer, but one I appreciate the most is her ability to write about the hardest, darkest subjects with a light, knowing hand. Situations are bleak, but life is not. Life is hard and hilarious and good and complex and often, entirely inexplicable. Winik shows us that in this book. I love The Glen Rock Book of the Dead. I think you will too."
"She had graduated from the same university as I, though ten or so years earlier, and returned to campus to read from her memoir at the bookstore where I oversaw events. Twenty-plus years later, I am reviewing titles to be released this fall and see Marion Winik has a new book due out from Counterpoint in October, The Baltimore Book of the Dead. Apparently this new book is a follow-up to her book from 2010, The Glen Rock Book of the Dead (Counterpoint). Odd, I think, I don’t recall this earlier book at all. I am intrigued by the premise of both books, collections of brief biographies of people in Winik’s life who have died, and order in a copy of the early collection to read now. A slim, small-trimmed paperback that actually fits in my back pocket arrives, and I take it on a holiday to the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina, where I read it on a deck surrounded entirely by trees, not a view to speak of, only trees and the sun cutting through the cool morning air. I read the collection in one sitting, and when I finish, I immediately put pen to paper and write a letter to a dear friend, telling her how much I loved this book and how much I thought of her, or, rather, thought of our friendship, our conversations filled with the glory and pain and wonder and humor and poignancy of life and our world. The Glen Rock Book of the Dead is a special book: Marion Winik offers the reader a celebration of life and death that packs far more power than expected from such a slender read."  |
