2022 · Joel Crawford · 102 min · Animation, Adventure, Comedy
Puss in Boots: The Last Wish is the best DreamWorks film since How to Train Your Dragon, a visually revolutionary and emotionally mature adventure about mortality, identity, and the courage to keep living.
2001 · 5 Seasons · HBO · Drama
A family that runs a funeral home becomes the vehicle for one of television's most honest explorations of mortality, grief, and the messy business of being alive. The performances are uniformly excellent, the writing swings between dark comedy and genuine devastation without ever losing its balance, and the series finale remains the gold standard for how to end a show. Seasons three and four stumble in places, and the pacing will test anyone looking for conventional drama. None of that diminishes the cumulative power of what Alan Ball and his cast built across 63 episodes. Few shows have ever understood their own subject this completely.
1955 · Juan Rulfo · 124 pages · Literary Fiction
Rulfo's slim, haunting masterpiece blurs the line between life and death in a ghost town ruled by memory, creating one of the most influential novels in the Spanish language.
1983 · Stephen King · 374 pages · Horror
Pet Sematary is Stephen King's most personal and most disturbing novel, a book he famously considered too dark to publish. It works because the horror isn't supernatural at its core. It's the horror of a parent confronting what they would do to undo the worst thing that could happen. The answer King provides is devastating.
1987 · Terry Pratchett · 272 pages · Fantasy
Pratchett's fourth Discworld novel is the first genuine classic of the series, using Death's surprisingly charming apprentice to explore mortality, duty, and the comic absurdity of existence with a lightness that belies real depth.
1930 · William Faulkner · 267 pages · Literary Fiction
As I Lay Dying is Faulkner at his most accessible and his most disturbing, sometimes in the same paragraph. The Bundren family's journey to bury their mother becomes an odyssey of stubbornness, grief, selfishness, and endurance that is simultaneously horrifying and very funny. Faulkner wrote it in six weeks, and the speed shows in the best possible way: the novel has a propulsive energy that his more labored works sometimes lack. Whether it's a tragedy wearing the mask of comedy or a comedy built on tragedy is a question the novel refuses to answer, and that refusal is part of what makes it great.