Weepers: A Novel
By (Author) Peter Mendelsund
Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc
Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc
30th September 2025
21st July 2025
United States
General
Fiction
813.6
Hardback
320
Width 146mm, Height 216mm, Spine 27mm
417g
Ed is a weeper. A professional weeper. He's a card-carrying member of Local 312, an eccentric union of mourners, hired for funerals and wakes, services and burials. But all that feeling can wear a man down, and the tears don't come like they used to. Especially as the normals, the privileged non-weepers, appear to feel less and less every day, even as the world gets worse and worse. Lately it's been drier and hotter than hell itself. And then one morning a new kid shows up. No belongings, no parents, no name. He's young, scrawny, non-union. Ed can't help but feel a fondness for him. The kid never sheds a tear, but he is charged with a strange, divine power to make others feel. He leaves a trail of something-call them miracles, call them disasters-in his wake. And then he disappears. A surrealist story of mass grief, of feeling and failing, of families and cowboys and deserts and strung-out souls, Peter Mendelsund's Weepers is a messianic mystery for this age and the next.
Peter Mendelsund is a novelist, a graphic designer, and the creative director of The Atlantic. He is the author of several books about literature and the visual imagination: What We See When We Read, Cover, and The Look of the Book: Jackets, Covers, and Art at the Edges of Literature. His debut novel, Same Same, was published in 2019, and his second novel, The Delivery, was published in 2021.