Book cover of Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death

Book description

How animals conceive of death and dying-and what it can teach us about our own relationships with mortality

When the opossum feels threatened, she becomes paralyzed. Her body temperature plummets, her breathing and heart rates drop to a minimum, and her glands simulate the smell of a putrefying corpse. Playing…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Playing Possum as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

This book gave me the dose of reality I needed: a big slap in the face! Our way of feeling, suffering, and worrying about death is just one among many ways of facing it.

Put bluntly, we don’t have an exclusivity agreement with life or death; we are simply another form of life on planet Earth—a much-needed blow.

If you love Playing Possum...

Book cover of December on 5C4

December on 5C4 by Adam Strassberg,

Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!

On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…

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