Man’s reaction to his own mortality is a topic that’s been showing up on my personal radar quite a bit lately. Zadie Smith’s recent essay Man vs. Corpse (The New York Review of Books, December 5, 2014); Drew Gilpin Faust’s National Book Award winning This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (which, admittedly, has been sitting on my bookshelf for some time) … Continue reading The Corpse Washer by Sinan Antoon, translated from Arabic by the author