Penultimates

by Thomas Farber

The Now & The Not-Yet is a master stylist’s meditation on aging and facing the end. Compassionate and wry, Thomas Farber, author of more than twenty works of fiction and creative nonfiction, offers an assessment of his own mortality—and ours. The interconnected essays read like prose poems, appraising with empathy and wit insights and struggles of a rich collage of artists and thinkers. Approaching age eighty, Farber both memorializes lost friends and, unflinching, takes the measure of our current moment. Sharing what’s learned and felt as those close to him approach the inevitable, his elegant writing offers readers guidance for their lives as well.

116 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 20, 2024

Reviews

[Clifford · Rating 5 out of 5]

Penultimates, by Thomas Farber is a new book that came out this month. Here’s the blurb I gave the book: Dwelling on endings and near-endings, as Thomas Farber does in his lyrical and reflective book Penultimates, is paradoxically uplifting. The reader is treated to a series of short, poignant essays that honor the approach and arrival of old age, without trepidation or regret. There is, perhaps, a bit of wistfulness in these pages, but also a sense of gratitude for the accomplishments and courage of many of the people the author has admired over the course of a long life. There is also an air of inevitability, although let us hope, as the title of the collection suggests, that these are not Farber’s last words on the subject.