Just because this is a collection of essays about psychics, murderers, strange disappearances, and occult phenomena doesn't mean it isn't funny. With wit, wry curiosity, and redemptive irony John P. O'Grady peels back the surface of the seemingly normal to reveal the dubious, the inexplicable, and the outlandish. Grave Goods includes ghost stories, macabre modern legends, and metaphysical investigations, all informed by the natural sciences, history, philosophy, literature, and mythology. From laugh-out-loud funny to eerily thoughtful, these essays reveal the natural world as a place of unnatural surprises and strange beauty. A place where Rip Van Winkle, O'Grady's college buddies, and ragtag psychics rub shoulders with Buddha, Socrates, and Stephen King-and it all makes perfect sense.
John P. O'Grady has taught American literature and environmental writing at the University of Alaska Anchorage and at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania. He currently lives and writes in the Catskill Mountains of New York, USA. He is a coeditor of Literature and the Environment: A Reader on Nature and Culture and the author of Pilgrims to the Wild (University of Utah Press, 1993).
"Grave Goods is a first-rate collection, revealing not only the surprising connections between ordinary things, but their metaphysical and philosophical implications as well. His stories, though rooted in everyday reality, stretch our imaginations toward the fantastic and the supernatural."--John Algeo, editor of The Quest "Grave Goods is highly serious light reading. It is 'light' because it illuminates and because it never takes itself as seriously as its serious subjects. John O'Grady, like any fine scientist, is a first-rate observer. Like any fine writer he makes invisible links between disparate objects and perceptions visible. Reading this book is like walking through the world with a highly knowledgeable naturalist-poet-philosopher. I don't know your taste in journeys, but this book is mine."--Peter Coyote, poet and actor "John O'Grady is the cream of the next generation of American nature writers. While he is new and experimental and all of that, the pleasure of reading O'Grady's work resides where it always has in any fine writer: engaging the intelligence and imagination of another person through the medium of language. In O'Grady's case, the intelligence is both rigorous and wide-ranging, the imagination downright wild, and all expressed with a wit that arcs between sweetly goofy and canine sharp. Grave Goods is the real goods, natural as a six and five."--Jim Dodge, author of Fup and Not Fade Away "This book is good company, primed with curiosity, energized with irony. You walk and talk with it."--Edward Hoagland, author of Tigers and Ice: Reflections on Nature and Life
