Finalist for the National Books Critics Circle in Criticism

A moving reflection on a subject that touches us all. The Art of Death is at once a personal account of Danticat’s mother dying from cancer and a deeply considered reckoning with the ways that other writers have approached death in their own work. The book moves outward from the shock of her mother’s diagnosis and sifts through Danticat’s writing life and personal history, all the while shifting fluidly from examples that range from Taye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go to Toni Morrison’s Sula. The narrative, which continually circles the many incarnations of death from individual to large-scale catastrophes, culminates in a beautiful, heartrending prayer in the voice of her mother. A moving tribute and work of astute criticism, The Art of Death is a book that will profoundly alter all who encounter it.

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Reviews

“This book is a kind of prayer for her mother — an act of mourning and remembrance, a purposeful act of grieving. It’s also a book about how Danticat and other writers have tried to come to terms with the fact of death.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times Book Review

“Danticat’s is a memoir written in a manner akin to the circular, overlapping and overwhelming processes of grief and mourning.”—Los Angeles Times