ABOUT THIS BOOK

Detached from life in Los Angeles and his past in Australia, uncomfortable around other humans, the narrator of this inventive autobiographical novel researches death on the Internet; mulls over distant and intimate stories of suicides, serial killers, and “natural deaths”; and wanders about LA’s Holy Cross Cemetery. Wry yet somber, astringent yet tender, The Disintegrations confronts both the impossibility of understanding death and the timeless longing for immortality.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Alistair McCartney is the author of The End of the World Book, a finalist for the PEN USA Literary Award in Fiction. He teaches creative writing at Antioch University Los Angeles.

REVIEWS

“A book that teems with life, even as it trains a determined eye on the threshold where life vanishes.”—Seattle Times

“An engaging, enigmatic meditation on death that's both conversational and humorous, both academic and (if you'll pardon the pun) deadly serious.”—Lambda Literary

“Manages to capture the complications of mourning—the sense that the departed are shockingly distant yet painfully proximate, forever absent yet frozen in memory. . . . The Disintegrations shows [McCartney] reckoning with, and reveling in, death’s mysteries from the liminal space of the writing life.”—Los Angeles Review of Books

TABLE OF CONTENTS

The Weight
Holy Cross Cemetery
My Grandma’s Resurrection
Holy Cross Cemetery, Part Two
The Cycle of Experience
Robert
The Dead Man’s Things
Orientation
Mike Hazelwood and the Floor of the Dead
The California Section
A Tour
The Birnies
Brushes with Death
Demographics
Heidi’s Book
Notable Persons
The Mourners
The Dancing Corpse of Jill Yip
A Hole in the World
Disintegration
Erin’s Trip
Regulations
The University of Disintegration
Chris, a Recipe
My Coffin
The Caretaker’s Wife
Cooper’s Story
A Hole in the Ground
Odors
Aino’s Song
How to Dispose of Me
The Mourner
Eun Kang and the Ocean
Death Dream #1
Data
My Grandfather’s Hemorrhage
Immortality
An Encounter
The Ballad of Sandra Golvin
A Death Book
The Hearses

A Note on Sources
Acknowledgments

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