Grief is hot these days, the market for the grief memoir apparently insatiable. With all due respect, we can’t resist the train wreck, the impossible accident, the ravages of cancer and mental illness, the suicide. We devour the moving testimonies of Joan Didion (twice), Joyce Carol Oates, Anne Roiphe, David Rieff, Meghan O’Rourke, Francisco Goldman, Jill Bialosky, Gail Caldwell, to name only a recent few, excellent books and major sellers all. Sarah Manguso’s slim and stunning The Guardians is not, however, your standard grief memoir. Not by a mile.

The controlled derangement of Manguso’s work, its gorgeous kaleidoscopic race through past and present, here and there, is riveting from the opening lines: “The Thursday edition of the Riverdale Press carried a story that began: An unidentified white man was struck and instantly killed by a Metro-North train last night as it pulled into the Riverdale station on West 254th Street. The train engineer told the police that the man was alone and that he jumped.”

The man’s name was Harris and he was Manguso’s closest friend. He is, at first, a fact. Then a ghost. And then, entirely real. In flashes of color, light, and movement, bits of remembered dialogue, reveries and now-hopeless possibilities, Harris comes into focus. Like a developing Polaroid image, he is the animating presence of Manguso’s world, vivid testimony to what she has lost. A brilliant musician, he wrote software, found math erotic, rode a folding bike, liked whitefish and Manhattans, endured three psychotic breaks, and possessed a gift for friendship, intimacy, and disguising anguish. Or as Manguso puts it: “He timed his jump in front of the train and that’s the story.”

That is not, of course, the story. The Guardians is an anatomy of suffering as well as an elegy. “I want to know about my particular grief,” Manguso writes, “which is unknowable, just like everyone else’s.” How, then, to translate the unknowable? She yearns for dybbuks and psychics, wrestles with language and narrative, remembers the jewel-colored candies filled with lacrime d’amore that she devoured during her fellowship in Rome, the hectic cadence of post-college life in New York, the hilarious mystery of Harris’ reputedly majestic penis, the pain of her own devastating illness, and the side-effects of the antipsychotic Haloperidol that cause akathisia, an unbearable restlessness of the body that often culminates in acts of violence, including homicide and suicide by jumping.

A prize-winning poet, memoirist, and short story writer, Manguso understands that grief can be so stunning, so disorienting that it deranges. We are said to be “mad” with grief, strangers to ourselves. Precise, watchful, and often darkly humorous, Manguso knows too that there is no final accounting, no resolution. There is only the effort to understand herself, to hold onto Harris in spite of the fact that the laws of the universe cannot be repealed, and to acknowledge the nearness of worlds we cannot know. When someone we deeply love dies, we are often at a loss for words. Manguso fortunately is not. An astonishing, beautiful, and devastating work.

People have strong feelings about some of our lifetime’s greatest minds, often willing to defend personal opinions to the death (or, at least, to an uncomfortable height of tension during cocktail parties). There are some whose minds, though, are undebatedly brilliant: Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, Stephen Hawking, Marissa Mayer, Maya Angelou, and many others. Add to this list Christopher Hitchens, whose own brilliance remained evident even through his dying days, as he wrote his last work, Mortality.

Leave it to Hitchens to take a diagnosis of death – an incurable, semi-treatable cancer – and turn it into an opportunity for shared reflection, conversation about the afterlife, and a reason to give thanks. With both eyes wide open, Hitchens confronted his fate and in a slim volume published this year, not quite one year after his December 15, 2011 death, shared his unabashedly upfront thoughts on religion, the experience of sickness, the struggle of reconciling one’s pride with one’s condition, and more. Mortality could just as easily be called “What It’s Like for a Man to Die” – though somehow, that feels more morbid than the actual nature of the book.

There’s a moment in Mortality during which Hitchens talks about the joy he and his friends used to find in gathering over great meals to take part in great conversation. So much seemed about the food, the meal, the nourishment. When his esophageal cancer eventually took the pleasures of eating away from Hitchens, his friends still came, and still conversed. It took this experience for Hitchens to realize that it wasn’t actually about the food for his friends – it was about him: his company, his conversation. And how wonderful of a realization is that?

From the awkwardness of being confronted by a stranger who feels compelled to share a “similar” story (Even though it was a cousin. Whose cancer was in the liver. And who went into remission. And then eventually died anyway.) to his fabulous and succinct advice for writers, Hitchens fits so much into a mere 104 pages. Mortality. It’s what so many of us fear, what so many of us speak of only objectively, and it’s what makes all of us human. Mortality. It’s what Christopher Hitchens faced head-on as one of his life’s greatest events. And we, mere mortals, are lucky enough to be able to revisit that event.

And so begins The End of Your Life Book Club, with a simple question lobbed by Will Schwalbe into the uncomfortable silence of Memorial Sloan-Kettering’s outpatient care center. “What are you reading?” he asks his mother, the spirited and remarkable Mary Anne, who has been ambushed midway in her project to build a library in Afghanistan by a rare form of advanced pancreatic cancer. As extraordinary as this mother is, her son’s anguish threatens at times to render him speechless. Hence, the idea discovered almost by accident, of their own private book club in which, despite their different journeys, “we could still share books, and while reading those books, we wouldn’t be the sick person and the well person; we would simply be a mother and a son entering new worlds together.”

Mothers and sons, let me count the ways. From Barack Obama to James McBride, Philip Roth to David Rieff, sons have plumbed the many facets of this often fraught, often tender, always complex nuclear relationship. The uniqueness of Schwalbe’s tribute to his mother, and to their mutual love, lies in this shared reading experience, which allows them to dispense with the usual bedside platitudes, the premature eulogies, the awkward and endless variations on the theme of “how are you doing,” and to talk about what is really going on, to have, many times over, that final conversation so often dreaded by patient and survivor, parent and child.

As a friend of mine once wrote, dying is a social act, a truth fully understood and embraced by both this mother and son. During the countless hours spent waiting – in hospitals, doctors’ offices, chemo rooms and medical labs – they read and talk, with honesty and humor. Fiction and poetry, history and the spiritual, mystery and fantasy: Crossing to Safety, On Chesil Beach, Appointment in Samarra, Marjorie Morningstar, The Hobbit, A Thousand Splendid Suns, Full Catastrophe Living, Olive Kitteridge, Suite Francaise, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the wide-ranging list of books the remarkable Schwalbes leave us is a testimony to the power of books to instruct, inspire, and amuse, “to give us something we all can talk about when we don’t want to talk about ourselves.”

They are, of course, talking about themselves, creating as they do so a powerful bond not only between each other, but between them and us, their fortunate readers. As Mary Anne’s disease progresses, their book club inspires them to share a treasure of wonderful family stories, thus becoming a celebration not of death so much as life. “Reading isn’t the opposite of doing,” Will writes, “it’s the opposite of dying.” This unique and endearing memoir is at once a courageous personal exploration of love and loss as well as a tribute to the solace and power of the written word. As Mary Anne insists, “Books are the most powerful tool in the human arsenal [and] reading all kinds of books … is how you take part in the human conversation.”

The first time my heart broke as a young reader was at the conclusion of Charlotte's Web. I never saw the passing of that beautiful arachnid coming; it hit me like a slap in the face. I was turned off to tragedy for years, leaving the family room when I sensed impending on-film sadness on family movie night, turning off the Atari when I wasn't happy with the inevitable results of Space Invaders, keeping my feet bare well into autumn. I didn't think I could take any more. But then, as I approached the worldly and savvy age of ten, I picked up Katherine Paterson's Bridge to Terabithia. My mother screened my reading choices as a child, lest I accidentally and prematurely cross the bridge from Judy Blume's Freckle Juice to Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, and when I brought Terabithia to her in the bookstore, she eyed it warily, remembering the aftershocks of Charlotte's death. But here I was, determined and so much wiser. And then there I was a short time later, heartbroken again.

Paterson's Newbery Award-winning book tells the story of Jess Aarons. Jess has been training on his family's farm in rural Virginia all summer long for one reason: to be the fastest runner in the fifth grade. The school year begins and the first race finally rolls around. Jess is confident that he's going to win. But then, in a shocking turn of events, Leslie Burke (a girl!) finishes first. Leslie is the new girl in town. She and her parents, free-spirited writers, moved to a house near Jess's family's home. In spite of their rocky beginnings, Leslie and Jess soon embark on an incredible friendship. Two loners with big imaginations escape together day after day to the magical kingdom of Terabithia, gotten to only by rope swing, a land in which they rule as king and queen, with a dog named P.T. as protector and jester.

And then fate steps in. On a rare day that finds Leslie heading to Terabithia alone, tragedy strikes, and Jess's world is forever changed. Readers are pulled into Jess's struggle as he grapples with loss. As a young reader, one is introduced to grief -- and yet learns to reconcile grief with gratitude, as Jess finds warmth in his heart for the short time Leslie was part of his life.

There are certain books that we read over the years that stay with us for any of a multitude of reasons. Katherine Paterson's Bridge to Terabithia is one of those books. The reasons? Its lessons: tragedy is manageable, grief is natural, true friendship is special, and imagination is key. The second time my heart was broken was with my first reading (of many) of Bridge to Terabithia. If you've not read it, read it now. If you have read it, revisit it. Read it and revisit it and then share one of the most beautiful heartbreaks you'll ever experience.

About This Book:

A kayak accident during a South American adventure takes one woman to heaven — where she experienced God’s peace, joy, and angels — and back to life again.

In 1999 in the Los Rios region of southern Chile, orthopedic surgeon, devoted wife, and loving mother Dr. Mary Neal drowned in a kayak accident. While cascading down a waterfall, her kayak became pinned at the bottom and she was immediately and completely submerged. Despite the rescue efforts of her companions, Mary was underwater for too long, and as a result, died.

To Heaven and Back is Mary’s remarkable story of her life’s spiritual journey and what happened as she moved from life to death to eternal life, and back again. Detailing her feelings and surroundings in heaven, her communication with angels, and her deep sense of sadness when she realized it wasn’t her time, Mary shares the captivating experience of her modern-day miracle.

Mary’s life has been forever changed by her newfound understanding of her purpose on earth, her awareness of God, her closer relationship with Jesus, and her personal spiritual journey suddenly enhanced by a first-hand experience in heaven. To Heaven and Back will reacquaint you with the hope, wonder, and promise of heaven, while enriching you own faith and walk with God.

Excerpt:

Chapter 9
An Adventure in Chile

“Moreover, no man knows when his hour will come.” —Ecclesiastes 9:12 (NIV)

In January 1999, Bill and I left our children in the capable hands of our nanny and flew from our wonderful Wyoming winter to the delightful Chilean summer. This was our first trip “alone” since Peter’s birth and we were looking forward to a terrific adventure. We flew into Temuco, which is about seven hours south of Santiago and about one hour north of our destination of Pucón.

Pucón is a resort-destination town on the shores of the deep and beautiful Lake Villarica, thriving in the shadow of the 9,315-foot Villarica volcano. It is in the heart of Chile’s IX Region, the Lake District. This region is populated by multiple glacier-topped volcanos, providing clear, cool water to the many rivers that form these beautiful lakes.

We stayed in a rental house with the Longs who, at that time, consisted of; Tom and Debbi, Kenneth, their twenty-year-old son, and his wife, Anne, Chad, their eighteen-year-old son, and Tren, their sixteen-year-old youngest son.

We spent a delightful week with Tom, kayaking on the rivers and playing in the whitewater of southern Chile. Bill and I were already proficient kayakers, but we continued to work on our Eskimo rolls, our boating skills in pushy and steep water, and we paddled a number of both scenic and challenging rapids. We also practiced our Spanish, absorbed the wonderful culture, and enjoyed the lake, the town, and the exquisite scenery. Evenings were spent chatting around a blazing fire after first walking into town for ice cream. The time was thoroughly relaxing and we were sad to realize that the end of our trip was quickly approaching.

We began to make plans for our final day of boating, which was to be on the Fuy River with Tom, Kenneth, Chad, Anne, several Americans with whom we had never boated, and a young Chilean man who was working for the Longs that summer.

The Fuy is a river in the Southern Chilean Los Ríos Region that drains from the northern end of Lake Pirihueico and winds along the northern foothills of the Choshuenco volcano before joining the Neltume River to form the Llanquihue River, which then empties into the glacial Panguipulli Lake. Bill and I are experienced kayakers and have paddled many challenging rivers in the United States, so we were looking forward to our run down the upper section of the Fuy, which is known for its tropical beauty and array of challenging waterfalls – drops of ten to twenty feet, making them exciting but well within our paddling skills.

We first drove to the small village of Choshuenco (population 625) near the shores of Panguipulli, then further to the river put-in. This was a remote area of very sparse population, thick forest, and no development. Once on the river, there really wouldn’t be the option to stop paddling or get off the river, so when Bill quite unexpectedly awoke that morning with significant back pain, he decided not to boat.

Although it was a typical sunny, warm Chilean day, I didn’t have a good feeling about the trip. I am not a socially graceful person, so assumed it was just my underlying awkwardness and unease of being in a group of new people. Retrospectively, Anne also had a sense of great unease. She wasn’t sure why she felt this way. At the time, she thought she was uncomfortable because she was not totally familiar with this river and we were putting on the river later than we had planned, or maybe because it was a group of people who had not previously boated together. Regardless of the reason, she felt a generalized sense of stress.

Bill dropped us off at the put-in, where we met up with the other Americans, and there were joking comments made about being able to see me easily because I was wearing my husband’s bright red drytop instead of a more subdued color of paddling shirt. There was some expected anxiety about the anticipated waterfalls and the possibility of boaters making flat landings, as this can cause a broken back. So there were also comments made to the effect that we would be in good company since I am a spine surgeon. As we put on the river, Chad called out to my husband, “We will bring back your wife, and she won’t be an inch shorter” (humorously implying that I wouldn’t compress my spine with any flat landings). Bill drove off in the truck, intending to find a sunny spot in which to spend the day reading. He planned to meet us at the take-out later in the day.

As our group started down the river, there didn’t seem to be any clear boating order, but I tried to stay away far from one particular boater who seemed to have limited skills, no sense of boundaries, and made me feel very apprehensive. I disregarded my apprehension, as it was a beautiful afternoon and I was excited about the upcoming waterfalls.

We approached the first significant drop not long after putting on the river and stopped in an eddy (an area of slow water that is usually downstream of a rock or next to the shore) to discuss how we should run it. There was a narrower channel to the right side of the river and a larger main channel to the left. We decided to run the smaller channel, as it was more predictable and straight forward. The main drop had a tremendous amount of flow, with a steep drop and large hydraulics at its bottom.

Boater number one paddled toward the channel on the river right, but approached with too much angle and her boat became lodged sideways between the two large boulders flanking the drop. Although her boat was stuck, she was able to exit her boat and flush into the pool of calm water below the drop. I had already exited the eddy and was unable to stop my forward progress when I saw her boat blocking our chosen route, so paddled further to the left.

As I paddled forward, the boater who I had been trying to avoid and who had been behind me, washed out of the upper eddy and then bounced ahead of me. She bobbled a bit before going over the main drop backward. Unknown to me, her boat became lodged in the rocks below the turbulence of the main drop. She was able to exit her boat and swim to a rock in the middle of the pool below. I was unaware of her predicament and had few options, so I continued paddling.

As soon as I crested the top of the waterfall, I saw nothing but trouble and knew I was going to have a problem. A big problem. There was a tremendous volume of water flowing through this channel, causing the water at the bottom to be chaotic and violent. I saw a large hydraulic formed by the churning waves and saw no exit. I took a very deep breath and dropped down the waterfall and into what would become a great adventure.

Despite the volume and power of the falling water, her boat prevented any hope of making a clean exit. As my boat rocketed down, the front dove under the other boat and became pinned between it and the submerged rocks of the waterfall. The water immediately engulfed me, my boat, and the previously pinned boat. I was upright in my boat, but the water was flowing over the top of me. My boat and I were essentially buried under both falling water and the other boat. The force of the water was so great that I felt like a rag doll. My body was forced onto the front deck of my boat, with my arms helplessly being pulled downriver.

Anne paddled into the channel on the right, knocked the broached boat loose, and continued into the pool below. Chad went down the main channel. The water was so deep in this drop that he didn’t see or feel anything as he paddled down the drop and right over the two boats (and me) that were submerged at the bottom.

As Chad and Anne entered the pool below, they noted boater number one swimming in the water, and easily located her boat which had been dislodged from the right channel. They were then surprised to see a second swimmer (this was the boater whose boat was on top of mine), but could not immediately locate her boat. Chad quickly paddled into an eddy to further evaluate the situation. He could see boater one. Her boat had been dislodged by Anne, and he easily located it on the river bank. He also could see the second boater sitting on a rock in the middle of the river, but he could not immediately locate her boat. At last, he finally caught a glimpse of her red boat at the bottom of the main channel.

It was difficult for Anne and Chad to account for everyone as, at this point in time, our group of paddlers was split: some of the boaters were below the drop and some were still above the drop. It took several minutes and several head counts before Anne was firmly convinced that both my boat and I were missing. Familiar with emergency situations, she started her watch.

Excerpted from To Heaven and Back by Mary C. Neal, MD. Copyright © 2012 by Mary C. Neal, MD. Excerpted by permission of WaterBrook Press, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

There are a few things you don't expect to see in a young adult book. Somewhere near the top of the list would probably be Hell. Fiery depths? Eternal torment? Isn't that a little bit rough for this age group? But that's what makes Dale E. Basye's Heck so surprising, and so great. Basye takes his crazy premise and pushes it to silly and ridiculous extremes. The result is a fast-paced, witty, and incredibly fun book.

It would be hard to list all the things that this book gets right. First things first: It's hilarious. Roald Dahl gets a lot of credit for writing wickedly funny books that appeal to children's darker sense of humor. But, really, he has nothing on Basye. In the first chapter alone, Heck's two young protagonists, Milton and Marlo, are done in by a freak marshmallow accident. Now that's a gutsy move! But it's all done with perfect timing and tone, and the book is darkly comic, instead of just being dark.

Most of the humor comes from gloriously gross things. Each demon that Milton and Marlo meet in Heck is more disgusting than the last, and each punishment is crazier and more severe. The feel of the book is over the top, with each chapter topping the next with its inventive ideas and sickening situations. It will have kids laughing aloud, because it's clearly for them and them alone. No adults allowed!

Throughout Heck, you can sense how much fun the author had writing each page. While reading, I kept imagining what his brainstorming sessions were like, and wishing I had been there. ("Well, if kids go to Heck, then the principal has to be the devil! And instead of pitchforks, everyone should have sporks!") Every page is chock-full of clever ideas, puns, and wordplay. It's impossible not to get caught up in the excitement.

However, for all its wacky monsters and bizarre locations, the book still rings true. Every ironic punishment feels like something kids actually experience (trips to the principal's office, wearing horrible clothing, etc.). Even better, Milton and Marlo are smart and dynamic kids surrounded by idiotic adults. And really, what preteen doesn't feel like that?

A surprisingly sweet aspect of the book is the brother and sister relationship between Marlo and Milton. This is the most accurate portrayal of that dynamic I've read in a long time. They get on each other's nerves. They live to bother each other, and often want nothing to do with each other. But underneath it all, you can see the tender feelings that they would never admit having. The negativity makes their sibling relationship feel more real, but the affection between the pair makes you root for them to pull together in the end.

In short, Heck is super fun. It's adventurous, exciting, and laugh-out-loud funny, and should be catnip for preteens. For avid readers, there are plenty of more Heck books after this initial one in the series. And for reluctant readers, this is the first book that I would throw in their direction.

What happens to us after we die? Not in the context of an afterlife or lack thereof, but really, physically – what happens to our bodies? It’s this question that is at the core of Mary Roach’s book Stiff.

Roach’s study begins as she arrives to observe a seminar on anatomy. This seminar is like none that you or I have attended, however. This one has as its focus forty human heads, freshly lopped from their lifeless bodies, perched in what Roach refers to as roasting pans, awaiting the prodding hands of the surgeons registered for the session. Thankfully, Roach wastes no time in injecting humor into her telling of the scenario, and while she does nothing to sugarcoat the often grisly details of what she witnesses, it’s somehow easier to, er, stomach the task at hand.

Roach’s research takes us well beyond the safe confines of a research laboratory. We find ourselves by Roach’s side as she embarks on a guided tour through a forested grove in Knoxville, Tennessee, that brings new meaning to the phrase “field research.” At this medical facility, cadavers have been donated to the study of forensics, each brought out to the fenced-in woods to decay under the watchful eyes of the researchers, who document in detail what each passing minute does to the body, from the initial drop in temperature (1.5 degrees per hour until the body reaches the temperature of the air around them) straight through to self-digestion, bloat, and, yes, liquefaction and putrefaction. (It was somewhere in the pages of this particular chapter that I decided beyond a shadow of a doubt that, for me, cremation is the way to go. Ashes to ashes sounds way better than ashes to muck.)

Roach takes the reader in detail through the various ways people die – car accident, plane crash, gunshots, bombs, and even crucifixion – and what these exit paths physically do to the body. Sound morbid? It is. And it’s also incredibly fascinating. Without Roach’s deadpan humor and interwoven history lessons, Stiff would feel a bit like (really, really) gross voyeurism. But in her unique style of story-telling, her lessons become an incredibly captivating scientific narrative. You want to turn away, but you can’t. And as my beach companions were loath to learn one sunny summer day, you also can’t help spouting out random facts from the book. Finally, Roach wraps up Stiff with a word on various personal postmortem options, as well as her own opinion of donating one’s body to medical science and the reasons behind the shortage of, ah, fresh skeletons.

So if you’ve ever entertained a certain morbid curiosity about cadavers – or if you’re only beginning to entertain that curiosity now – Stiff is for you. It’s not for the faint of heart, mind you, as Roach spares no detail in her descriptions of the various effects that death, and how that death occurs, has on a body. But if you’ve got the stomach for it, it’s wildly informative, enlightening, and most unexpectedly, entertaining.