For Freebie Friday this week, you have a chance to win Joyce Carol Oates' new memoir, "A Widow's Story." She describes her shock and pain in early 2008, when she took her husband of 46 years to the emergency room at Princeton Medical Center. He was admitted with a diagnosis of pneumonia, and less than a week later -- even as Oates was preparing for his discharge -- he died of an infection.
Here's more from the publisher, Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins: As never before, Joyce Carol Oates shares the derangement of denial, the anguish of loss, the disorientation of the survivor amid a nightmare of "death-duties," and the solace of friendship. She writes unflinchingly of the experience of grief—the almost unbearable suspense of the hospital vigil, the treacherous "pools" of memory that surround us, the vocabulary of illness, the absurdities of commercialized forms of mourning. Here is a frank acknowledgment of the widow's desperation—only gradually yielding to the recognition that "this is my life now."
For a chance to win, just leave a comment about what you're reading this week.
Meanwhile, let's congratulate Gail Farrelly, the winner of "Endgame," our most recent giveaway. The biography of chess genius Bobby Fischer chronicles his rise to world champion -- and his descent into paranoia.