We all have to die someday—some people just find more bizarrely hilarious ways to go The woman who drank herself to death with water trying to win a games console by holding in her pee. . . the mechanic who blew himself up while trying to open a rocket-propelled grenade with a sledgehammer. . . a lottery winner killed by the gates of his new luxury home. . . a woman felled forever by a fatal falling lettuce. . . an octogenarian who met his maker while riding a shopping cart. . . a German artist crushed by one of his own sculptures, called "Woman with Four Breasts". . . the convicted murderer who electrocuted himself on the toilet as he repaired a TV—all true reports from across the globe which reveal the silliest ways you can meet your maker. Death may seem like a serious business, but this is a seriously funny book.

Hundreds of entertaining, freshly collected factual accounts are all in this book - the largest collection of hilarious stories chronicling bizarre, amazing and absurd ways to die.

Hundreds of entertaining, factual accounts of bizarre, amazing and absurd ways to meet your maker are collected in this book. It is a huge collection of incredible cautionary tales about the undignified ways you can kick the bucket and they're all true!

The gangster who danced himself to death. The fortuneteller who didn't foresee that her client would kill her. Read about it all, and hundreds more, in this all-true treasury of freaky fatalities. Death is tragic--but it's sometimes undignified, too. And there are many ways you can exit the stage of life that are quite embarrassing. For example, there's the man who got into a fight with a monkey and lost, and the burglar who thought he was Santa Claus and got stuck in a chimney. These hundreds of entertaining true reports from across the globe reveal the most ridiculous ways you can meet your maker--and they'll make you laugh in spite of yourself.

If he had been with me everything would have been different... I wasn't with Finn on that August night. But I should've been. It was raining, of course. And he and Sylvie were arguing as he drove down the slick road. No one ever says what they were arguing about. Other people think it's not important. They do not know there is another story. The story that lurks between the facts. What they do not know—the cause of the argument—is crucial. So let me tell you...

“The ultimate literary bucket list.” —THE WASHINGTON POST Celebrate the pleasure of reading and the thrill of discovering new titles in an extraordinary book that’s as compulsively readable, entertaining, surprising, and enlightening as the 1,000-plus titles it recommends. Covering fiction, poetry, science and science fiction, memoir, travel writing, biography, children’s books, history, and more, 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die ranges across cultures and through time to offer an eclectic collection of works that each deserve to come with the recommendation, You have to read this. But it’s not a proscriptive list of the “great works”—rather, it’s a celebration of the glorious mosaic that is our literary heritage. Flip it open to any page and be transfixed by a fresh take on a very favorite book. Or come across a title you always meant to read and never got around to. Or, like browsing in the best kind of bookshop, stumble on a completely unknown author and work, and feel that tingle of discovery. There are classics, of course, and unexpected treasures, too. Lists to help pick and choose, like Offbeat Escapes, or A Long Climb, but What a View. And its alphabetical arrangement by author assures that surprises await on almost every turn of the page, with Cormac McCarthy and The Road next to Robert McCloskey and Make Way for Ducklings, Alice Walker next to Izaac Walton. There are nuts and bolts, too—best editions to read, other books by the author, “if you like this, you’ll like that” recommendations , and an interesting endnote of adaptations where appropriate. Add it all up, and in fact there are more than six thousand titles by nearly four thousand authors mentioned—a life-changing list for a lifetime of reading. “948 pages later, you still want more!” —THE WASHINGTON POST