Penultimates is an intimate and moving book by a master stylist. Farber’s words sear though the page, wounding and healing at the same time.
—Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Gene: An Intimate History and The Emperor of All Maladies
Weaving together memory and memorials, a clear-eyed view of what it means to face an end (the end?)…PENULTIMATES is a lively, empathetic, funny, and above all compassionate view of the world as Farber has lived and loved it.
—Eva Hagberg, author of When Eero Met His Match and How To Be Loved
This is a book about death. It is also a book about surfing. It is a poem. It is also prose, or whatever you want to call it. Mostly, it is a Book of Wisdom in the ancient sense of the term, like what Hesiod or Lao Tzu might have written had they lived into the 21st century, and been possessed of a wicked sense of humor, a vast arsenal of kick-ass quotes, and an indefatigable love of life that bubbles up through every sadness and disappointment.
—Morgan Meis, author of The Fate of The Animals and The Drunken Silenus
In Penultimates, Thomas Farber gives us what we need most: a rich, funny, and searching meditation about questions facing us at the end: How to live, how to die, what does it mean…A guide we deserve for the passage awaiting us all.
—Elizabeth Weil, author of No Cheating, No Dying, coauthor of The Girl Who Smiled Beads
Awarded a Guggenheim fellowship for fiction and, three times, National Endowment fellowships for fiction and creative nonfiction, recipient of the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize, Thomas Farber has been both a Fulbright and Rockefeller Foundation scholar. His many books include Acting My Age, Here and Gone, The End of My Wits, Brief Nudity, and The Beholder. Former visiting writer at Swarthmore College and the University of Hawai‘i, he teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.