How the Dead Live
- ISBN-10
- 1555972810
- ISBN-13
- 9781555972813
- Series
- How the Dead Live
- Pages
- 229
- Language
- English
- Published
- 1998
- Publisher
- Graywolf Press
- Author
- Alvin Greenberg
Description
How the Dead Liveis filled not with victims of the many major traumas of our times but with individuals whose lives have been wrested from their control by the random impact of the commonplace: by accident and disease, by urban chaos, by the lost and the found. The ancestor of this collection, as of most American short fiction, is undoubtedly Edgar Allan Poe, with characters caught up in his recognition that "to be buried alive is, beyond question, the most terrific of these extremes which has ever fallen to the lot of mere mortality." Greenberg's stories are full of people who are buried in their own lives and strugling with whatever crude tools come to hand--humor, despair, confrontation, acceptance--to carve out a little underground space where they can breathe. Through small moments of the ridiculous and larger moments of emotional conversation, the stories re-enact the drama of how we are all to survive our own immersion in the inexplicable.
