"At the age of 36, on the verge of a completing a decade's worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi's health began to falter. He started losing weight and was wracked by waves of excruciating back pain. A CT scan confirmed what Paul, deep down, had suspected: he had stage four lung cancer, widely disseminated. One day, he was a doctor making a living treating the dying, and the next, he was a patient struggling to live. Just like that,...

Jim Dent, the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of The Junction Boys, returns with a powerful Texas story which transcends college football, displaying the courage and determination of one of the game's most valiant players. Freddie Steinmark was an under-sized but scrappy young man when he arrived in Austin as a freshman at the University of Texas in 1967. Despite the pronouncement by many coaches that he was too small to play football...

In the span of four months in 2012, Tig Notaro was hospitalized for a debilitating intestinal disease called C-diff, her mother unexpectedly died, she went through a breakup, and she was diagnosed with bilateral breast cancer. Days after her diagnosis, Tig took her grief onstage, opening an unvarnished set with, "Good evening. Hello. I have cancer." The set went viral instantly and was later released as an album, Live, and was nominated for a Grammy....

At the high point of a soaring career in the US Army, Lt. Col. Mark Weber was tapped by General David Petraeus to serve in a high profile job within the Afghan Parliament as a military advisor. Within weeks a routine physical revealed stage IV intestinal cancer in the thirty-eight-year-old father of three. When Mark realized he was not going to survive this final tour of combat, he began to write a letter to his boys, so that as they grew up without...

Teresa Rhyne vowed to get things right this time around: new boyfriend, new house, new dog, maybe even new job. But shortly after she adopted Seamus, a totally incorrigible beagle, vets told Teresa that he had a malignant tumor and less than a year to live. The diagnosis devastated her, but she decided to fight it, learning everything she could about the best treatment for Seamus. Teresa couldn't possibly have known then that she was preparing herself...

The author recounts some of the difficulties she has faced, including the death of her son, cancer, and her husband's public affair, and shares how she has managed to adapt and survive.

"A divinity professor and young mother with a Stage IV cancer diagnosis explores the pain and joy of living without certainty. Thirty-five-year-old Kate Bowler was a professor at the school of divinity at Duke, and had finally had a baby with her childhood sweetheart after years of trying, when she began to feel jabbing pains in her stomach. She lost thirty pounds, chugged antacid, and visited doctors for three months before she was finally diagnosed...

"A co-written project by Irvin and Marilyn Yalom, which describes their heartbreaking journey as a couple married 65 years facing the end of their long partnership. A longtime teacher and therapist on the subject of death anxiety, Dr. Yalom now confronts the loss of his wife and his own mortality. This book will offer wisdom from one of the foremost existential psychiatrists and illuminate the importance of relationships-friendship, family, and romantic-as...

From the acclaimed author of The Hard Way on Purpose comes a vibrant, heartfelt memoir about confronting mortality, surviving loss, finding resilience in one's roots and seeking a father's wisdom through an unusual woodworking project -- constructing his own coffin. With wisdom and humor, Giffels grapples with the hard questions as he and his father saw, hammer, and sand their way through a year bowed by loss.