An exploration of how email is experienced, understood, and materially structured as a practice spanning our everyday domestic and work lives. Despite its many obituaries, email is not dead. As a global mode of business and personal communication, email outstrips newer technologies of online interaction; it is deeply embedded in our everyday lives. And yet—perhaps because the ubiquity of email has obscured its study—this is the first scholarly book devoted to email as a key historical, social, and commercial site of digital communication in our everyday lives. In Email and the Everyday, Esther Milne examines how email is experienced, understood, and materially structured as a practice spanning the domestic and institutional spaces of daily life. Email experiences range from the routine and banal to the surprising and shocking. Drawing on interviews and online surveys, Milne focuses on both the material and the symbolic properties of email. She maps the development of email as a technology and as an industry; considers institutional uses of email, including “bureaucratic intensity” of workplace email and the continuing vibrancy of email groups; and examines what happens when private emails end up in public archives, discussing the Enron email dataset and Hillary Clinton's infamous private server. Finally, Milne explores the creative possibilities of email, connecting eighteenth-century epistolary novels to contemporary “email novels,” discussing the vernacular expression of ASCII art and mail art, and examining email works by Carl Steadman, Miranda July, and others.

For readers of Being Mortal and When Breath Becomes Air, the acclaimed founder of Death over Dinner offers a practical, inspiring guide to life's most difficult yet important conversation. Of the many critical conversations we will all have throughout our lifetime, few are as important as the ones discussing death—and not just the practical considerations, such as DNRs and wills, but what we fear, what we hope, and how we want to be remembered. Yet few of these conversations are actually happening. Inspired by his experience with his own father and countless stories from others who regret not having these conversations, Michael Hebb cofounded Death Over Dinner—an organization that encourages people to pull up a chair, break bread, and really talk about the one thing we all have in common. Death Over Dinner has been one of the most effective end-of-life awareness campaigns to date; in just three years, it has provided the framework and inspiration for more than a hundred thousand dinners focused on having these end-of-life conversations. As Arianna Huffington said, "We are such a fast-food culture, I love the idea of making the dinner last for hours. These are the conversations that will help us to evolve." Let's Talk About Death (over Dinner) offers keen practical advice on how to have these same conversations—not just at the dinner table, but anywhere. There's no one right way to talk about death, but Hebb shares time—and dinner—tested prompts to use as conversation starters, ranging from the spiritual to the practical, from analytical to downright funny and surprising. By transforming the most difficult conversations into an opportunity, they become celebratory and meaningful—ways that not only can change the way we die, but the way we live.

As a colleague of deputy coroner Mattie Winston, social worker Clothilde “Hildy” Schneider is no stranger to unsolved murders at Sorenson General Hospital. Except this time, it’s up to her to crack the case . . . Motivated by her own difficult past, Hildy has an unparalleled commitment to supporting troubled clients through grief and addiction in Sorenson, Wisconsin. But when a distraught group therapy member reveals disturbing details about her late son’s potential murder, Hildy goes from dedicated mental health professional to in-over-her-head amateur sleuth . . . Alongside her loyal therapy Golden Retriever, Hildy stumbles through incriminating clues—and an unlikely partnership with Detective Bob Richmond, the irresistibly headstrong cop who shares her passion for helping others. With signs of foul play surfacing all over town, can Hildy and Detective Richmond pinpoint the deadly traits of a sharp-witted killer before another seat gets filled at grief therapy? Praise for Annelise Ryan and her Mattie Winston series “The funniest deputy coroner to cut up a corpse since, well, ever!” —Laura Levine, author of Killer Cruise “The forensic details will interest Patricia Cornwell readers . . . while the often slapstick humor and the blossoming romance between Mattie and Hurley will draw Evanovich fans.” —Booklist

This book is for everyone at some time in their life. If you’re breathing, this book’s for you... or your parents, friends, teenagers moving into their first apartment, newlyweds, new parents, siblings, ... oh, and the person or people you name as executor. Hope to be a beneficiary or heir? Yup, you too. Think you can do it alone? Be my guest, but first Google “executor horror stories.” What makes this book different? • It’s four for the price of one: You can use it when you’re naming, accepting to be, or serving as executor, and if you’re an heir or beneficiary. • It’s by a layperson who survived: Most of what you’ll find about naming, being, and dealing with executors comes from legal, financial, or tax experts, and governments. Makes sense. For them, death is a growth industry. But for you, it’s about naming someone you trust to look after your affairs when you die, understanding the effort and risks if you’ve been asked to be an executor, managing an estate effectively if you’re acting as one, and knowing where you stand if you expect to inherit. • It offers useful tools: The book provides plain-language explanations, checklists, templates, and tips. • It’s long-lasting: While legal, tax, accounting, and financial rules change, and the book mainly uses Ontario examples, the process to follow and the questions to ask experts will not. Also, the approach is generally similar to that in many other countries. • Caution: To help relieve the subject's misery and tedium, this book uses humour—be warned!

Honor your loved ones and the earth by choosing practical, spiritual, and eco-friendly after-death care Natural, legal, and innovative after-death care options are transforming the paradigm of the existing funeral industry, helping families and communities recover their instinctive capacity to care for a loved one after death and do so in creative and healing ways. Reimagining Death offers stories and guidance for home funeral vigils, advance after-death care directives, green burials, and conscious dying. When we bring art and beauty, meaningful ritual, and joy to ease our loss and sorrow, we are greening the gateway of death and returning home to ourselves, to the wisdom of our bodies, and to the earth.

Brittany, France. Near the coast. A picturesque inn. Spectacular scenery. Tasty French treats. Time off from school. Tallis Challinor imagines this as the perfect vacation scenario, so when her grandfather suggests that she accompany him to the country of her ancestors, she is more than happy to tag along. What Tallis doesn't bargain on is another ghostly encounter, especially not so soon after she's sealed up a bunch of unruly ghosts on their side of the portal between the human and spirit realms. But, when she feels the energy radiating from the megalithic standing stones dotting the countryside around Carnac, France, an energy that feels frighteningly like the power exuding from the portal in her basement back home, she has a feeling she might be in trouble. And, she is right. When her grandfather goes missing, Tallis leaps into action. She calls the only ghostbuster she knows in France and, with help on the way, she gears up to battle another set of spirits bent on causing destruction. Along the way, Tallis is forced to examine her life, her relationships, and her tightly-held beliefs about who she is and where she comes from. She also has to juggle two impossible males, both attractive but annoying, both seemingly set on driving her nuts or breaking her heart.

"Splendid" —New York Times "Mind-bending." —Wall Street Journal "Brilliantly original. The best new novel I've read this year." —Salman Rushdie A daring, kaleidoscopic novel about the clash of empires and ideas, told through a tennis match in the sixteenth century between the radical Italian artist Caravaggio and the Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo, played with a ball made from the hair of the beheaded Anne Boleyn. The poet and the artist battle it out in Rome before a crowd that includes Galileo, a Mary Magdalene, and a generation of popes who would throw the world into flames. In England, Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII execute Anne Boleyn, and her crafty executioner transforms her legendary locks into those most-sought-after tennis balls. Across the ocean in Mexico, the last Aztec emperors play their own games, as the conquistador Hernán Cortés and his Mayan translator and lover, La Malinche, scheme and conquer, fight and f**k, not knowing that their domestic comedy will change the course of history. In a remote Mexican colony a bishop reads Thomas More’s Utopia and thinks that it’s a manual instead of a parody. And in today’s New York City, a man searches for answers to impossible questions, for a book that is both an archive and an oracle. Álvaro Enrigue’s mind-bending story features assassinations and executions, hallucinogenic mushrooms, bawdy criminals, carnal liaisons and papal schemes, artistic and religious revolutions, love and war. A blazingly original voice and a postmodern visionary, Enrigue tells the grand adventure of the dawn of the modern era, breaking down traditions and upending expectations, in this bold, powerful gut-punch of a novel. Game, set, match. “Sudden Death is the best kind of puzzle, its elements so esoteric and wildly funny that readers will race through the book, wondering how Álvaro Enrigue will be able to pull a novel out of such an astonishing ball of string. But Enrigue absolutely does; and with brilliance and clarity and emotional warmth all the more powerful for its surreptitiousness.” —Lauren Groff, New York Times-bestselling author of Fates and Furies "Engrossing... rich with Latin and European history." —The New Yorker "[A] bawdy, often profane, sprawling, ambitious book that is as engaging as it is challenging.” —Vogue