Baptizing the Dead and Other Jobs

I was struck from the first sentence by the crystalline narrative voice—sometimes uncanny, sometimes weird, but always precise, unflinching, and painfully self-aware—and the experimentation with form as a way to dig deeper and question ideas of religion, family, place, community, masculinity, death, and the self. These essays, and their narrator, wouldn’t shake from me after I read them. I wholeheartedly recommend Baptizing the Dead and Other Jobs.

Baptizing the Dead and Other Jobs is not about Mormonism. It’s about the human condition, and the brilliant nonfiction writer Michael Palmer has nailed it in this collection. The first and last essays are masterpieces of the current form. It’s a mix of the traditional and the experimental, exactly what American literature has been since its beginning. Nothing is predictable in this book. That’s why it’s nothing less than art.