A Newcomer's Guide to the Afterlife: On the Other Side Known Commonly As "The Little Book" Book

A Newcomer's Guide to the Afterlife is a unique collaboration of three authors - two living and one dead. The text has a strange provenance. It was received by Daniel Quinn in a dream - from the hands of a recently deceased acquaintance. Or maybe it wasn't. With the help of Tom Whalen, Quinn brings to living readers an unearthly gazetteer affectionately known among the dead as "The Little Book." The answers to life's great questions about the beyond lie within these pages. Or maybe they don't. A Newcomer's Guide to the Afterlife can be read as a parable, an allegory, a work of fiction - or exactly what it claims to be: a helpful handbook for the recently deceased. However it's read, readers will find it filled with uncommon wisdom, bizarre imaginings, uncanny perceptions, and unexpected humor. They will discover that the departed have not given up on sex, controversy, speculation, or religion - far from it! They will learn how to get over the staggers, how to avoid becoming a deadhead, how to survive outbreaks of memory-loss hysteria, and how to deal with troublesome neighbors and disconcerting phantasms. They will find out how some famous people in history are passing their time in the hereafter, and how some completely unfamous people have become Afterlife celebrities.

The winner of the one-time-only Turner Award for upbeat visionary fiction, Daniel Quinn (Ishmael) teams up with Tom Whalen (The Camel's Back) to create the whimsical A Newcomer's Guide to the Afterlife: On the Other Side known commonly as "The Little Book". Some tips are predictable: people make their own heavens and hells. Others are arresting. While most of us become "Regulars" after we die, for example, infants become "Husks," doll-like outlines of the adults they might have become, devoid of all the lines and scars of true humanity. Illustrations.