Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish

From the incomparable David Rakoff, a poignant, beautiful, witty, and wise novel in verse whose scope spans the twentieth century

Through his books and his radio essays for NPR's This American Life, David Rakoff has built a deserved reputation as one of the finest and funniest essayists of our time. Written with humor, sympathy, and tenderness, this intricately woven novel proves him to be the master of an altogether different art form.

LOVE, DISHONOR, MARRY, DIE, CHERISH, PERISH leaps cities and decades as Rakoff sings the song of an America whose freedoms can be intoxicating, or brutal.

The characters' lives are linked to each other by acts of generosity or cruelty. A daughter of Irish slaughterhouse workers in early-twentieth-century Chicago faces a desperate choice; a hobo offers an unexpected refuge on the rails during the Great Depression; a vivacious aunt provides her clever nephew a path out of the crushed dream of postwar Southern California; an office girl endures the casually vicious sexism of 1950s Manhattan; the young man from Southern California revels in the electrifying sexual and artistic openness of 1960s San Francisco, then later tends to dying friends and lovers as the AIDS pandemic devastates the community he cherishes; a love triangle reveals the empty materialism of the Reagan years; a marriage crumbles under the distinction between self-actualization and humanity; as the new century opens, a man who has lost his way finds a measure of peace in a photograph he discovers in an old box--an image of pure and simple joy that unites the themes of this brilliantly conceived work.

Rakoff's insistence on beauty and the necessity of kindness in a selfish world raises the novel far above mere satire. A critic once called Rakoff magnificent, a word that perfectly describes this wonderful novel in verse.

Author: David Rakoff
Publisher: Doubleday Books
Published: 07/16/2013
Pages: 128
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.55lbs
Size: 8.20h x 5.80w x 0.50d
ISBN: 9780385535212


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal Prepub Alert 02/15/2013 pg. 70
Kirkus Reviews 05/15/2013
Publishers Weekly 05/27/2013
Library Journal 07/01/2013 pg. 74
Booklist 07/01/2013 pg. 28
Entertainment Weekly 07/19/2013 pg. 89
New York Times Book Review 08/04/2013 pg. 9
New York Times Book Review 08/11/2013 pg. 22
NY Times Notable Bks of Year 12/08/2013 pg. 27
Christian Century 12/25/2013 pg. 33
Library Journal 02/15/2013

About the Author
David Rakoff was the New York Times bestselling author of the books Fraud, Don't Get Too Comfortable, and Half Empty. A two-time recipient of the Lambda Literary Award and winner of the Thurber Prize for American Humor, he was a regular contributor to This American Life. He died in August 2012 at the age of forty-seven, shortly after finishing this book.