Top ten memento mori

Greg Baxter is a fiction writer and essayist who lives in Dublin. He is the author of A Preparation for Death (Penguin Ireland, 2010). He worked as a Creative Writing tutor in the Irish Writers’ Centre from 2006 to 2009, before launching the Workshops at Some Blind Alleys. He has published essays and short stories in journals such as the Dublin Review, Cincinnati Review, and Southwest Review. He regularly reviews for the Irish Times.

For the Guardian, he named his top ten books that remind us of our own mortality. One classic on the list:

Death of Embarrassment: Ecce Homo by Friedrich Nietzsche

When your books are misunderstood and dismissed as the desperate and nonsensical ramblings of a lunatic, you can attempt to change your ways, become more acceptable, and please the greatest number of people. Or you can plunge yourself deeper into lunacy, write for the future, and call yourself a destiny. Who but a lunatic allows himself to say: "I am not a man. I am dynamite"?

Read about the other entries on Baxter's list.

--Marshal Zeringue