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OverviewThe Speaking Stone: Stories Cemeteries Tell is a literary love letter to the joys of wandering graveyards and the discoveries such wanderings can yield. Here, Michael Griffith roams Spring Grove (founded 1844), the nation’s third-largest cemetery, following curiosity and accident wherever they lead. The result is this fascinating collection, which narrates the lives of those he encountered on the way. Griffith lingers amidst the traces left behind—these are stories of race, feminism, art, and death, uncovered through obituaries, archival documents, and family legacies. Some essays focus on well-known figures like the feminist icon and freethinker Fanny Wright, but most chronicle the lives of lesser-known figures (a spiritual medium, a temperance advocate, the designers of caskets and hearses, the inventor of the glass-door oven) or of nearly unknown ones (a young heiress who died under mysterious circumstances, the daring sign-painters known as walldogs). The Speaking Stone examines what endures and what doesn’t, reflecting on the vanity and poignancy of our attempts to leave monuments that last. Archival photos grace the pages of these thirteen essays that explore a larger, deeply tangled complex of ideas about place, history, self, and art. Full Product DetailsAuthor: Michael GriffithPublisher: University of Cincinnati Press Imprint: University of Cincinnati Press Edition: First Edition, 1st ed. Dimensions: Width: 15.60cm , Height: 1.80cm , Length: 22.70cm Weight: 0.384kg ISBN: 9781947602304ISBN 10: 1947602306 Pages: 326 Publication Date: 15 April 2021 Audience: Professional and scholarly , Professional & Vocational Format: Paperback Publisher's Status: Active Availability: In stock  We have confirmation that this item is in stock with the supplier. It will be ordered in for you and dispatched immediately. Table of ContentsA State of Ungress: Composing as Rambling The Absent Guest: Leon Van Loo Bake Visibly!: Gustav Huenefeld “A Great Awkward Bunglehood of Woman”: Fanny Wright Interlude: The Bank-Shot Unmemoir “Death’s Taxicab”: Willard Hess and Martin Hale Crane Accidental Charon: Jacob Strader, Dred Scott, and Body-Snatching “Due Allowance for Foam”: Martha McClellan Brown and the Ohio Women’s Crusade “Another Well-Picked Skeleton”: Homunculi, Mail-Order Tree Stumps, Petrified Logs, and the Many, Many Charles Millers Outlook Hazy: Laura Pruden, Harry Houdini, and Arthur Conan Doyle Interrogate the Spirits Ghosts of the Walldogs: Gus Holthaus Interlude: The Crypto Auto-Obituary “And They Did Kill Her by Inches”: The Strange Case of Carrie Elder The Sculptor, His Son, the Odd Fellows, and the Weird Assassin: Louis Rebisso(s) and Oscar Mundhenk Six Degrees of Jonathan Cilley The Permeable Earth Acknowledgments Index Notes Illustration CreditsReviewsNovelist and English professor Griffith finds a fruitful ground for his research into the past in a vast Cincinnati cemetery, the third largest in the country, that contains poignancies and mysteries alike. . . . Griffith writes entertainingly of the city's early breweries, forgotten figures of national politics, local scandals and murders, and the like, concluding with the well-considered thought that when the time comes, 'it might be nice to have a stone...for people to stroll past.' -- Kirkus Reviews Michael Griffith's The Speaking Stone is a marvel: a marvel of erudition, a marvel of curiosity and craft, a marvel of intellect and openness. This a book that is obsessed--with gravestones and signs and cities, sure, but also with the stories of the people who made the signs, who are under the stones, who lived in the cities. Those people are gone, but wherever they are, I hope they realize how lucky they are that Michael Griffith is the one telling their stories. By telling their stories, Griffith has come up with a one-of-a kind way of telling our own, and his own. What a wise, funny, deeply humane book! -- Brock Clarke, author of Who Are You, Calvin Bledsoe? Michael Griffith is a masterful and quirky storyteller, and his new book will be known to future generations as one of the great literary oddities. I would be happy to sell it out of the trunk of my car - that's how much I love The Speaking Stone. -- David Kirby, Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English, Florida State University The Speaking Stone is a brilliant book of essays springing from Griffith's soulful rambles around a cemetery in Cincinnati. It's an ingenious anti-memoir full of strange and delightful tales from the lost corners of history, not least among them those concerning the author himself. -- Elizabeth McKenzie, author of The Portable Veblen Griffith finds a fruitful ground for his research into the past in the third largest [cemetery] in the country, that contains poignancies and mysteries alike. Entertaining...a fine prose rejoinder to Spoon River Anthology and other similar works. -- Kirkus Reviews The Speaking Stone is a brilliant book of essays springing from Griffith's soulful rambles around a cemetery in Cincinnati. It's an ingenious anti-memoir full of strange and delightful tales from the lost corners of history, not least among them those concerning the author himself. -- Elizabeth McKenzie, author of The Portable Veblen Michael Griffith is a masterful and quirky storyteller, and his new book will be known to future generations as one of the great literary oddities. I would be happy to sell it out of the trunk of my car - that's how much I love The Speaking Stone. -- David Kirby, Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English, Florida State University Michael Griffith's The Speaking Stone is a marvel: a marvel of erudition, a marvel of curiosity and craft, a marvel of intellect and openness. This a book that is obsessed--with gravestones and signs and cities, sure, but also with the stories of the people who made the signs, who are under the stones, who lived in the cities. Those people are gone, but wherever they are, I hope they realize how lucky they are that Michael Griffith is the one telling their stories. By telling their stories, Griffith has come up with a one-of-a kind way of telling our own, and his own. What a wise, funny, deeply humane book! -- Brock Clarke, author of Who Are You, Calvin Bledsoe? Griffith is a master storyteller. He begins finitely and then goes everywhere, and we readers are delighted to go with him. He makes the local, universal. This book will appeal to readers everywhere. -- David Kirby, Florida State University A fascinating read. The author's examples of Fanny Wright, Crane and Breed, and so forth are accurate and compelling. The ironic twists of the Crane and Breed/Hess and Esienhardt scenarios--tied to the assassinated presidents Lincoln and Kennedy--are exquisite exercises in critical thinking. The author's ties between Jacob Strader, the Supreme Court case Strader v. Graham, the later Dred Scott case, and John Scott Harrison are simply ingenious! -- Paul Tenkotte, Northern Kentucky University Author InformationMichael Griffith’s previous books are Trophy (named one of Kirkus Reviews’ Best Books of 2011), Bibliophilia, and Spikes. He is Professor of English at the University of Cincinnati and was the Founding Editor of Yellow Shoe Fiction, an original-fiction series from Louisiana State University Press. Tab Content 6Author Website:Countries AvailableAll regions |
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