The Death Of A Nobody

*Finalist, Hubert Evans Nonfiction Prize A genuinely moving, funny, and inventive account of loss and grief, mental illness and suicide, from film and TV producer Liz Levine (Story of a Girl), written in the aftermath of the deaths of her sister and best friend. I feel like I might be a terrible person to be laughing in these moments. But it turns out, I’m not alone. In November of 2016, Liz Levine’s younger sister, Tamara, reached a breaking point after years of living with mental illness. In the dark hours before dawn, she sent a final message to her family then killed herself. In Nobody Ever Talks About Anything But the End, Liz weaves the story of what happened to Tamara with another significant death—that of Liz’s childhood love, Judson, to cancer. She writes about her relationship with Judson, Tamara’s struggles, the conflicts that arise in a family of challenging personalities, and how death casts a long shadow. This memorable account of life and loss is haunting yet filled with dark humor—Tamara emails her family when Trump is elected to check if she’s imagining things again, Liz discovers a banana has been indicted as a whistleblower in an alleged family conspiracy, and a little niece declares Tamara’s funeral the “most fun ever!” With honesty, Liz exposes the raw truths about grief and mourning that we often shy away from—and almost never share with others. And she reveals how, in the midst of death, life—with all its messy complications—must also be celebrated.

An "analysis of deeper meaning behind the string of deaths of unarmed citizens like Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Freddie Gray, providing ... [commentary] on the intersection of race and class in America today"--

"I have never before read anything except Nabokov’s Speak, Memory that so relentlessly and shrewdly exhausted the kindness and cruelty of recollection’s shaping devices." —Geoffrey Wolff Born in Czechoslovakia, Mark Slouka’s parents survived the Nazis only to have to escape the Communist purges after the war. Smuggled out of their own country, the newlyweds joined a tide of refugees moving from Innsbruck to Sydney to New York, dragging with them a history of blood and betrayal that their son would be born into. From World War I to the present, Slouka pieces together a remarkable story of refugees and war, displacement and denial—admitting into evidence memories, dreams, stories, the lies we inherit, and the lies we tell—in an attempt to reach his mother, the enigmatic figure at the center of the labyrinth. Her story, the revelation of her life-long burden and the forty-year love affair that might have saved her, shows the way out of the maze.

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1914 edition. Excerpt: ... The old man made his way into the station and was at once swallowed up in its huge uneasy life. He was frightened of the crowd, which covered the platform in bunches, but was thin and straggling here and there with occasional isolated figures. His calm vanished, and he passed from group to group trying to find reasons for stopping somewhere. But where the groups were like solid lumps he was repulsed, and the straggling parts of the crowd infected him with their own anxiety, so that he ended by taking up a position between two placid-looking travellers, where he almost ceased to be afraid of missing the train. Bells vibrated, and the crowd, deeply stirred, suffered a change. A thousand links snapped or strained; the whole space swarmed with little moving forces, and was suddenly dotted with points, each of which formed the pivot of an eddy. Yet the general outlines were not altered. Godard could still see the two placid travellers beside him, with their bags on the ground against their legs; and there were the straggling lines, bulging with luggage, and the lumpy groups, still the same, except that they had shrunk a little. The noise of bells went on, like a frantic concentration of the passage of time. The crowd thought more and more intensely of the train. It felt it coming, with another crowd inside it--a calm crowd, that had sucked its fill of speed and was sleeping like a well-fed baby. The old man was in torments, and to calm his fears kept looking at his neighbours. He no longer felt that the journey was arranging itself, stage by stage, from his cottage to his son's body, or that the means of transport were fitted together without any effort of his own and waiting to sweep him along like a stream. "Shall I ever get there?" he...

There are people in this world who are Nobody. No one sees them. No one notices them. They live their lives under the radar, forgotten as soon as you turn away. That's why they make the perfect assassins. The Institute finds these people when they're young and takes them away for training. But an untrained Nobody is a threat to their organization. And threats must be eliminated. Claire has been invisible her whole life, missed by the Institute's monitoring. But now they've ID'ed her and have sent Nix to remove her. Yet the moment Nix lays eyes on her, he can't make the hit. It's as if Claire and Nix are the only people in the world for each other. And they are—because no one else can really see them.