Studies in the Hereafter

(Paperback)

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Description

A disillusioned office bureaucrat in the afterlife has come to realize that maybe heaven isn't all it's cracked up to be. Bored by the endless routine of work, golf, and vegan food, he finds his one saving grace in his Field Studies: detailed reports he compiles on the living in order to determine their best fit in his world. While working on his 6

Reviews

"A whimsical debut novel in which Bernard makes heaven the setting for a story of love and self-actualization. A highly enjoyableand . . . profounddebut."

Kirkus Reviews

"A soaring tribute to any human life, in all its flawed glory."

Diagram

"Studies in the Hereafter blends two well-crafted and charming stories togetheron one side you have the darkly humorous mystery and on the other a deeply introspective journey of human nature. A quirky but enjoyable read"

". . . a cleanly written narrative that dares to speculate wildly about the infrastructure of the hereafter . . . (and) also a profoundly human story. Above all, it's a book that celebrates existence."

Author Bio

Sean Bernard lives and teaches creative writing in Southern California, where he serves as Fiction Editor for The Los Angeles Review and also edits the journal Prism Review. He holds degrees from Arizona, Oregon State, and the Iowa Writers Workshop, and his fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in journals including Epoch,CutBank, LIT, Glimmer Train, and Sequestrum. His debut collection, Desert sonorous, won the 2014 Juniper Prize, and hes won grants and other awards from groups including Oregon Literary Arts, the University of Arizona Poetry Center, Poets & Writers, and, in 2012, a literary fellowship from the NEA. Studies in the Hereafter is his first novel.