Personal essays share the author's adventures after buying a vacation house on the Carolina coast and his reflections on middle age and mortality.

Old Hark is a creature of habit. He enjoys living in his weather-beaten house set down amidst the meadows. He has wood to chop, chores to do and time to reflect on a long life. His greatest joy is feeding the birds that have wintered over and have come to depend on him. One day, a black-robed spectre materializes out of the fields, brandishing the Book of Time. But it's too soon! An exchange follows that has the old man reach deep into his memory....

"For as long as she can remember, Belle has been insidiously obsessed with her skin and skincare videos. When her estranged mother Noelle mysteriously dies, Belle finds herself back in Southern California, dealing with her mother's considerable debts and grappling with lingering questions about her death. The stakes escalate when a strange woman in red appears at the funeral, offering a tantalizing clue about her mother's demise, followed by a cryptic...

"Courageous, insightful and candid thoughts on malady and mortality from one of our most celebrated writers"--Provided by the publisher.

Dr. Caroline Soames-Watkins's star has been on the rise. But when she accuses a superior of sexual misconduct, the Twitterstorm that follows upends her career. With few professional options and an impoverished sister with a disabled child to support, Caro is willing to consider a mysterious proposal from her great-uncle, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Samuel Watkins. Sam Watkins has invested untold sums of money to build a medical facility in the...

Humanity is on the verge of discovering immortality. The avatar of Death is cast down to Earth to live a mortal life in Mumbai as twenty-something Laila Starr. Will Laila take her chance to stop mankind from permanently altering the cycle of life?

"Ten years in the making, comes a literary work Like no other, from the legendary author of Watchmen, V for Vendetta, and From Hell. In the half a square mile of decay and demolition that was England's Saxon capital, eternity is loitering between the firetrap housing projects. Embedded in the grubby amber of the district's narrative among its saints, kings, prostitutes, and derelicts a different kind of human time is happening, a soiled simultaneity...

"A fresh, fierce, and timely meditation on data, pain, time, and the limited capacity of literature to comprehend life and death in a sensate and vulnerable body." -- When Boyer was diagnosed with highly aggressive triple-negative breast cancer, the illness was both a crisis and an initiation into new ideas about mortality and the gendered politics of illness. Here she explores the experience of illness as mediated by digital screens, weaving in...