From the best-selling author of Love's Executioner, a penetrating exploration of life, death, and the search for meaning. In his long-awaited new collection of stories, renowned psychiatrist Irvin D. Yalom describes his patients' struggles-as well as his own-to come to terms with the two great challenges of existence: how to have a meaningful life, and how to reckon with its inevitable end.

Irvin D. Yalom, MD, is professor emeritus of psychiatry at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He was the recipient of the 1974 Edward Strecker Award and the 1979 Foundations' Fund Prize in Psychiatry. He is the author of When Nietzsche Wept (winner of the 1993 Commonwealth Club gold medal for fiction); Love's Executioner, a memoir; Becoming Myself, a group therapy novel; The Schopenhauer Cure; and the classic textbooks Inpatient Group Psychotherapy and Existential Psychotherapy, among many other books. He lives in Palo Alto, California.