30 Stories About Life and Death

by Henri Colt

Overview

These stories explore themes of love, loss, joy, and connection. They are set in different locations around the world, with protagonists who display a certain vulnerability that invites deeper reflexion. This book asks readers to take a few minutes from their busy day...so they may jump into lands they'd never visit, meet characters they'd never know, peek into the mysteries of forbidden behaviors, and touch the vulnerability of the human heart.

Because in both Life & Death we are always looking to connect to someone.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780984834792
Publisher:	Rake Press
Publication date:	08/11/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	164
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

HENRI COLT is a physician, philosopher, and international scholar who has lived, worked, and lectured on six continents. In addition to writing scientific papers and medical textbooks, he is the author/editor of the popular The Picture of Health: Medical Ethics and the Movies and nonfiction works such as Becoming Modigliani. Dr. Colt is also a medical ethicist and University of California Emeritus Professor of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine with more than thirty years experience working with critically or terminally ill patients.. When he is not conducting seminars or climbing mountains, he lives in Laguna Beach, CA and Southern France.

Table of Contents

Prologue

LIFE

Tango

Forever Always

Does Anyone Sing at Easter

In Aristotle's Footsteps

Sticky Lips and The Stray Cat

Breakfast in Tokyo

Something about Chanel

A Girl Named Ahh

Gingerbread Love

My Guardian Angel

The Deer Trail

My Sixtieth Birthday

Alone

Serengeti 101

Eve's Night Out

DEATH

Unanswered Questions

Kate Can't Fly

A Cold Little Secret

Too Late for a Kiss

Whisper Red

Kansas City Ganges

Jungbu's Mother

Never a Coward

Sarah's Lesson

A Death in Quito

The Colonel's Daughter

Six Months and Counting

Going South

Qualis artifex pereo

Moroccan Blue

Permissions Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

"A surprisingly witty, sardonic and insightful prognosis of our mortality via ultra-short fiction...unearthing the humanity and humility of us all."

-Mark Savage, Director/Screenwriter

"It is in Colt's writing, sometimes with a zeal just this side of the erotic...that his traveler's soul truly soars-and ours with it."

-September Williams MD, Author/Filmmaker

From the Publisher

2023-06-02
Colt offers a collection of flash fiction in which the heart lies in what’s not said.

A section of stories titled “Life” includes a tale of a philosopher who finds his salvation in listening (“In Aristotle’s Footsteps”) and another in which a farewell in a doorway could be an invitation to more (“Sticky Lips and the Stray Cat”);they are often about moments that are made sweeter by indecision. In “Gingerbread Love,” two people with deep but unrelated histories in the same location, both suffering loss, find a personal connection. That story and “The Deer Trail,” about a father-son hike that moves from non sequitur to natural disaster, offer a flicker of what burns brighter in the “Death” stories: themes that touch on the impact of memory and the duration of love. Stories in this second section more easily find their footing and take readers to complex places. “A Cold Little Secret,” for example, opens with cinematic immediacy as two men tracking polar bears near Barrow, Alaska, flip their four-wheel-drive vehicle in subzero conditions: “My slightly dazed friend grabs some rope and a chainsaw from the back seat before clambering onto the snow.” But the accident doesn’t cause the death that this story is about; it goes deeper than a surface skid on ice. Colt was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for “A Death in Quito,” one of the best stories, in which bearing witness becomes a bulwark against being alone. “Kansas City Ganges” and “Jungbu’s Mother” are tales in which Colt reaches creative peaks: Personal stories interweave and shifts of great enormity occur in the silence between words—and they deliver on an implicit promise in the book’s first section.

Stories that effectively reveal meaning in spaces that seem empty and build bridges between characters’ joys and sorrows.

Kirkus Reviews