What would you say to the dead? What do you say to the dead?

Death is not the end of the conversation, as anyone with a dead friend knows. We go on talking, not because we are duped by magical thinking, but because there is more to say.

Language is not, as Nietzsche thought, a way of saying what is already dead in our hearts; it is a way of keeping ourselves and others alive. Telling stories till morning comes is what saves Scheherazade from the threat of death each night. The work of a writer is different only in degree — intensity — not in kind, to the work we all do to keep going. Narrative is a defence against emptiness and chaos. Think of Winnie in Beckett’s Happy Days, buried up to her waist in Act I and up to her neck in Act II, delivering her inspired hymn to life — even when life is a dust-mound heaped on the edge of death.

If language is the champion of life, it is the natural challenger of death. Death can take the body but not the body of work. We are not writing in water, as Keats feared, though ironically and deliberately he had that fear carved into stone — “Here lies one whose name was writ in water” — rather, we are making code for later generations. And it is code, because language changes and society changes and when we read back in time, to Shakespeare or to Dante, we find we must do some work to decipher the meaning.

Our brushes with the dead are encounters with a past that is and isn’t ours. What we find though, in these conversations across mortality, is that we are not alone. The room is not empty. The dead talk.

“Remember me,” says the ghost of Hamlet’s father. Writing is exactly that; an injunction against forgetting.

This collection of conversations with dead writers imagines that we can talk to those authors that interest us so deeply. We know that they talk to us, but what if we could be with them physically? What might we ask? What would we want to know? And why do we believe that they would ha...