Bring out Your Dead, so that we may read about them
February 6, 2011 7:17 AM   Subscribe

My sister and I enjoy a well written obituary. After reading the post yesterday about the Ghislaine de Polignac obit, I wonder if there's a good repository on the web of obituaries?

We have enjoyed the compendiums; The Dead Beat, The Economist Book of Obituaries and the yearly "The Lives They Lived" NYTimes mag. We send each other interesting ones we find from the famous to the local woman whose obit listed the local bars that would miss her dearly.

There's got to be a place to post the good ones, the stories where people invent cool stuff, do cool things and still seem to find the energy to have four children by three different men. Or just a good well-lived, well-loved life.
posted by readery to Grab Bag (11 answers total) 12 users marked this as a favorite
 
Best answer: Check the Pulitzer Prize winning, Jim Sheeler.
posted by timsteil at 8:17 AM on February 6, 2011


Best answer: The New York Times always has great obits, not just about famous people but about really interesting ones. There's a book titled The Last Word that is a collection of obits from years past. The book itself is more than a decade old but it would still make great reading.
posted by Kangaroo at 8:23 AM on February 6, 2011


Best answer: The alt.obituaries newsgroup sometimes has good ones.
posted by Tin Man at 8:37 AM on February 6, 2011


Best answer: BBC does a weekly obituary radio program called The Last Word that you might be interested in.
posted by rdr at 8:40 AM on February 6, 2011


Best answer: The Telegraph helpfully puts all its obituaries on one page (there's also an RSS feed).

Personal favourites of mine include the Independent on Glynn Boyd Harte ('his blacked-up face was dramatically enhanced by the application of a plate of pudding pushed into it by my wife'), the Telegraph on Brian Brindley ('suffered a heart attack between the dressed crab and the boeuf en croute'), the Economist on Margaret Gelling, and, best of all, the Telegraph on Sandy Fawkes ('the surprising thing was not that Sandy Fawkes often appeared drunk, but that she survived so long').
posted by verstegan at 9:17 AM on February 6, 2011 [1 favorite]


Best answer: I subscribe to alt.obituaries, too. People post links to the obits from all the major world's newspapers (and sometimes the full obits). I get about five digests a day. There are a lot of duplicates, but it's a great read.

Then again, sometimes there are obits for sports teams or Obamacare, depending on who is posting. You can just ignore those.
posted by vickyverky at 11:21 AM on February 6, 2011


Best answer: I love reading good obituaries too - this is my favorite: of Edward Said by Christopher Hitchens which from Slate.com's obit page. Also interesting - an article about the difference between British and American obits. I have links on this page for more interesting obit articles and info.
posted by serunding at 11:28 AM on February 6, 2011


Best answer: You might want to have a look at Obituary Forum - the blog for the Society of Professional Obituary Writers.
posted by unliteral at 6:55 PM on February 6, 2011


Best answer: Just this week I found Obit Magazine. Celebrating Saint Ronnie is a fun read.
posted by rdc at 7:19 PM on February 6, 2011


Best answer: Do you know the Blog of Death?
posted by equivocator at 3:07 PM on February 7, 2011


A late answer - but I love the Guardian's Other lives.
posted by paduasoy at 1:09 PM on August 11, 2011 [1 favorite]


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