A top-ranked horse trainer and teacher, Gaffney writes about addiction, incarceration and the transformative effects horses offer to those who are fighting for a sober life outside the prison system. Ginger Gaffney is the author of the memoir Half Broke (Norton), about her time working with the troubled horses and residents at a prison re-sentencing facility in New Mexico. If the only certainties in life are death and taxes, these four books demonstrate that one can still be enjoyable to read about. Inherited taxidermy is also the driving force of Kristen Arnett's Lambda finalist Mostly Dead Things (Tin House, $15.95, available in paperback next week), a morbidly funny novel about a woman who takes on her father's trade after his death by suicide, and the family falling apart around her.

This improbable source of comedy manifests in Jessica Anthony's oddball satire Enter the Aardvark (Little, Brown, $26), when a stuffed aardvark lands on the doorstep of a closeted Republican congressman-a curious memento mori from his now-deceased lover. Neither loses sight of its peculiar humors. He then details their process of allowing the dead to decay before washing their skeletons in red wine and meticulously placing them in the ossuary.įelix sees the magnificence without losing sight of death's gravity McCartney sifts through its more granular aspects. 'I like the way they handle it on Mount Athos, the all-male monastery on an isolated rocky island in Greece,' McCartney writes. of Wisconsin, $17.95) is explicitly obsessed with the subject, and I think he might enjoy Felix's company more than Mino does. Alistair McCartney's narrator in the ruminative work of fiction The Disintegrations (Univ. 'That's because his hand is really in Christ's,' Felix explains, 'and this is only a sheet of canvas.'Ī global pandemic may seem like the worst-or most perfect-time to consider death as an extraordinarily dynamic canvas for literary contemplation.

Do you feel his warmth?' An understandably nervous Mino replies that no, he doesn't.

'Come,' Felix implores, 'take his hand and tell him your name. Since Felix is the resident crypt-keeper, the friends he is introducing Mino to are dead, decaying until their bones may be placed lovingly and more compactly in a deeper chamber. One of my favorite scenes in Katy Simpson Smith's marvelous third novel, The Everlasting (reviewed below, Harper, $28.99), has the ninth-century monk Felix introducing his young companion Mino to the monastery brethren.

Code Name Hélène by Ariel Lawhon