A book of comfort for bereaved pet lovers
When North Adams-based writer, editor, and researcher Sara Bader’s cat died, she looked for a book that could carry her through the grief. She wanted wisdom and solace from people who’d experienced the same loss, “small portions of literary nourishment” for her grief-fractured attention span. She couldn’t find such a book, so she made one herself. “The Book of Pet Love & Loss: Words of Comfort & Wisdom from Remarkable People” (Simon & Schuster) gathers a huge selection of observations, reflections, and insights on the deep and singular love for pets, and the specific vein of sadness when they die. Words from Andy Warhol, Otessa Moshfegh, Mr. Rogers, Keith Richards, Virginia Woolf, Louis Armstrong, Alison Bechdel, Amy Sedaris, Gertrude Stein, Zora Neale Hurston, as well as presidents, actors, and playwrights, fill the book with funny, sweet, loving, and aching celebrations and memories of cats and dogs and, in one case, a mongoose, that were loved and lost. “Charley is dead and only recently I don’t hear him in the night,” wrote John Steinbeck. “It is exceedingly short, his galloping life,” wrote Mary Oliver. “I have my stories of that grief, no doubt many of you do also. It is almost a failure of will, a failure of love, to let them grow old — or so it feels. We would do anything to keep them with us, and to keep them young. The one gift we cannot give.”
Coming out
“Someone Who Isn’t Me” by Geoff Rickly (Rose)
“So to Speak” by Terrance Hayes (Penguin)
“Pleasure of Thinking” by Wang Xiaobo, translated from the Chinese by Yan Yan (Astra House)
Pick of the week
Arwen Severance at the Bookstore of Gloucester recommends “Hang the Moon” by Jeannette Walls (Scribner): “Jeannette Walls is back with a novel this time around, about Sallie Kincaid, a young woman growing up in Virginia during Prohibition. After an accident with her half-sibling, Sallie is kicked out by her father, a formidable man. She returns nine years later to reclaim her place in the family.”