The Glen Rock Book of the Dead

This tiny book is made up of tiny sketches of the departed, their brevity a reminder of the brevity of all of our lives. They are known only by the nicknames Winik gives them—the Clown, the Junkie, the Queen of New Jersey—and their lives are not summarized on their own terms but by their presence, slight or central, in her own, which makes the book a kind of memoir by indirection, by an author who could easily have shared the fate of her subjects. (In time, like all of us, she will.) You might be reminded of Jim Carroll's punk-junkie anthem, "People Who Died": she shares some of his made-it-out-alive-for-now bravado, and the poignancy of a life, and a death, defined in just a few words. —Tom Old Book of the Week