Death keeps
excellent records
Michael Largo has spent decades cataloguing how we actually die, how the famous took their final bows, and what obsession costs. Final Exits, The Portable Obituary, and Genius and Heroin made him America's chronicler of mortality.
The Portable Obituary
How the Famous, Rich and Powerful Really Died
A luridly compelling and hilariously macabre look at how the famous took their final bows - from Socrates to Anna Nicole. How a famous person's deeds, intimate habits and lifestyles influenced their mode of death and determined their role in history and culture.
Explore the books
Five decades of meticulously researched work on death, dark history, and the stranger corners of the natural world.
Macabre
Death & Dark History
Encyclopedic
Nature & Reference
Fiction and Memoirs
Novels & Personal Stories
What Critics Say
"A fascinating journey through the world of plants, from the beneficial to the deadly."
Wall Street Journal
From the Blog
Creativity and addiction, and the price of brilliance
The pattern is old and stubborn enough that it stops looking like coincidence somewhere around the fiftieth entry.
What makes a southern gothic novel, and what does not
The setting gets the credit and the silence does the work. A look at the genre through two novels written twenty years apart.
Books about death that do not flinch
There is a whole shelf of books about death written by people who would rather be writing about something else. This is not that shelf.