The Art of Dying and other Stories

The Art of Dying and Other Stories is a breathtakingly imaginative set of short stories written by Mike Corwin. The eight short stories masterfully meander through themes of family, tragedy, life complications, love, parenthood, resilience, and change. The stories range from short entries such as “The Visit” and “You Gotta Stand Up” and long ones such as “The Importance of Living a Meaningful Life.” Throughout, shifting moods, evocative wordplay, and bold storytelling dominate through a string of clear-eyed prose. Together, the stories come alive in the reader’s mind depicting the true extent of the human spirit, both in its compassionate side and its dark motive.

Readers will be introduced to the first story titled “The Art of Dying”, a beguiling tale of a 53-year-old man who discovers he has a life-altering condition and does not have long to live and retreats to a quiet beach inn, away from his luxuries in Atlanta, with a plan to die knowing having accomplished a feat of existential significance. It is this narrative which forms a splendid springboard to the stories that follow in this beautiful masterpiece. Elsewhere, a high school girl whose resentful and vain mother abandons her and her dad, at a tender age, later learns to overcome the obstacles of growing up without a mother to look up to. In another entry titled “If I Had My Way in This Wicked World,” a ten-year-old boy with a difficult childhood, commits a heinous crime that gets him committed into a mental institution until his death years later.

Mike Corwin’s sublime work is simply elegant and rich in fine-grained detail. He has the apt ability to contrive the depth and intricacy that life truly holds. There is a story which will resonate with every reader. His stories are diverse, spanning different periods, and I easily got lost in the beautiful worlds the author created in each story. Artful and sophisticated, the plots employ the right amount of dialogue and give the characters a decent send-off as each tale draws to a close. Corwin managed to pique my interest in this genre. The virtuosic variety of his work is the hallmark of the collection. Altogether, The Art of Dying and Other Stories is a triumph, and deserves a place on the best seller’s list.

- Pacific Book Review

"As I read more about what’s required to lead a meaningful life, it seemed an essential component is love and compassion for other human beings."

Framed by two resonant stories about men in mid-life coping with terminal illnesses and impending death, this volume speaks also to the concerns of (mostly) male protagonists in settings across the American South. An Alabama native, Corwin writes with the assurance of an author steeped in the grand Southern writing tradition. As he mentions in “Biloxi: A Return Home,” the final novella-length tale, “Writers such as Faulkner, Percy, Crews, Styron, Harper Lee, and Capote, among others, had transformed the values and traditions of the South into great literature.” The collection’s tone is decidedly literary, with most stories containing a preponderance of narrative with occasional short scenes featuring bursts of dialogue.

“A New Orleans Life,” one of the most appealing and more conventionally written stories, explores a romance between two Tulane University students with very different backgrounds. Tess hails from a bigoted, conservative family from Montgomery, Alabama, and Gabriel, a New Orleans native, is a mixed-race orphan passing as white. He holds a more liberal and worldly outlook than Tess after studying in Boston and New York. The unlikely match seems destined for a breakup, but the couple are determined to salvage whatever harmony can be resurrected from their opposing viewpoints. The story explores Gabriel’s revelations of his humble origins as the child of a prostitute and his later connection with a temporary but loving stepmother, a confident Cajun woman and devout priestess in a Catholic-influenced Voodoo congregation. Manon, fearful for Gabriel’s future, helps the lovers find their way forward.

In essence, Corwin’s character-driven stories reflect the human determination to live a positive life or create redemption after a less-than-stellar life. There is a good bit of historical research melded with imagination in these tales and much thoughtful examination of how the Southern historical influences stimulate character growth.

- The US Review of Books