You can't help thinking back to "Grand Illusion," a grave essay on universal brotherhood which strolls along as if it were light comedy.
John has written all sorts of things, from novels (A Small Still Voice, The Whole, Snowball's Chance) to mash-ups of Shakespeare plays (All the World's a Grave) to essays, criticism, and poetry that have been in places like Playboy, the Paris Review, and the Believer.
The result is "Walter Benjamin's Grave," a moving essay about the cemetery, eyewitness accounts of Benjamin's border travails, and the circumstances of his demise.
Then, in the rest of the essay, Grann raises grave doubts about that evidence.
To the Editor: Mark Epstein's essay does a grave disservice to trauma sufferers when he says people must live with trauma.
Albert Camus Mythee de Sisyphe (1942; Myth of Sisyphus) and his subsequent Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel) consist of grave, but inconsistent and often unconvincing, essays loosely linked together.
"As Anna Akhmatova, the great poetic chronicler of Stalin's terror, said, 'I am alive in this grave,' " Ms. Tymoshenko wrote in an essay published in The Moscow Times.
In his 1987 essay "Is the Rectum a Grave?" Leo Bersani famously wrote that "to want sex with another man is not exactly a credential for political radicalism," decoupling sexual preference from necessarily engaging in a subversively political way of life.
In an essay called "One Foot in the Grave," he is stalking a hot dog in Chicago's O'Hare Airport when the gout hits his big toe.
Flemish writers, even in this modern incarnation, tend to be deeply conscious of their cultural past, and one of Brijs' previous books is a collection of essays built around pilgrimages to the graves of dead Flemish writers.
