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A messianic tale about a group of professional mourners―a darkly funny novel of grief, mystery and redemption from the author of The Delivery.
Ed is a weeper. A professional weeper.
He's a card-carrying member of an eccentric union hired to cry at funerals, wakes, services and burials. It's an odd job, but his services are sorely needed these days, as the town, the region, the country as a whole has become more or less numb. No one is able to summon a shred of human emotion whatsoever. Not anymore. (What'd be the point? The world's already gone to hell.)
So there's always work for Ed and his colleagues. But all those cries can wear a man down, and the tears don't flow quite like they used to, even for a consummate pro like Ed.
Then one morning, a stranger comes to town. A scrawny kid with no belongings, no parents, no name, no past. And at precisely the moment of his arrival, people begin to experience something new. Something strange. An onslaught of unbidden feelings, unfamiliar feelings, too many feelings
A surrealist story of mourning and messiahs, deserts and droughts, cowboys and junkies, miracles and mass hysteria, the lure of despair and the solace of friendship. Peter Mendelsund's Weepers is a novel for this age: our age of anesthesia and anger.
"Mendelsund suffuses his meditation on performative grief with inspired stylistic flourishes, evoking the cadences of Donald Antrim and the baroque drama of Flannery O'Connor. As the story builds toward a violent showdown between the mourners and the town, the reader will be entranced by its surreal language and bizarre logic. This is astonishing." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Stylish, witty, surreal—a meditation on the power of emotion to bind us in an ever-drier, less hospitable world." —Kirkus Reviews
"Ed's narration, a combination of hard-earned wisdom and darkly humorous faux-Biblical rambling, makes for compelling reading. However, the novel's esoteric themes and frustrating pace might limit its broader appeal." —Library Journal
This information about Weepers was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Peter Mendelsund is a novelist, a graphic designer, and the creative director of The Atlantic. Mendelsund is the author of several books about literature and the visual imagination: What We See When We Read, Cover, and The Look of the Book: Jackets, Covers, and Art at the Edges of Literature. His debut novel, Same Same, was published in 2019.
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