THE BOOK OF RESTING PLACES

"Mira y Lopez's first book is a thoughtful, intriguing collection of 10 personal essays dealing with the dead and where they end up . . . These are wide-ranging and often tender meditations on death." -- Kirkus Reviews

In the aftermath of his father's untimely death and his family's indecision over what to do with the remains, Thomas Mira y Lopez became obsessed with the type and variety of places where we lay the dead to rest. The re-sult is a singular collection of essays that weaves together history, mythology, journalism, and personal narrative into the author's search for a place to process grief.

Mira y Lopez explores unusual hallowed grounds -- from the world's larg-est cryonics institute in southern Arizona to a set of Roman catacombs being digested by modern bacteria, to his family's burial plots in the mountains outside Rio de Janeiro to a nineteenth-century desert cemetery that was relocated for the building of a modern court-house. The Book of Resting Places examines these over-looked spaces and what they tell us about our-selves and the passing of those we love -- how we grieve them, and how we attempt to forget them.

THOMAS MIRA Y LOPEZ is from New York City. He earned an M.F.A. in creative nonfiction from the University of Arizona, and his work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Kenyon Review Online, and The Normal School, among other publications. He currently lives in North Carolina, where he is the 2017-2018 Kenan Visiting Writer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.