Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. Peter Mendelsohn's new novel, Weepers,

is about people hired to cry at wakes, funerals, or burials. On its face, it doesn't announce itself

as an overtly Christian novel, but in this interview with NPR Scott Simon, Mendelsohn name checks

John the Baptist,

the Book of Lamentations, he calls the novel Messianic.

And I guess it does make sense for a book that is asking questions about grief and death

to be at least thinking about religion in its subtext.

After the break, Mendelssohn talks about what happened in his own life that led him to contend with the miraculous.

In the world where just about everyone may worry, they'll soon be replaced by smart machines.

A cowboy poet named Ed has seemed to find enduring work in a small dying town of the American Southwest.

He is a weeper, a member of Local 302, a union of workers hired to mourn at funerals.

As Ed muses,

Misery loves company, but hey, at least we were miserable, which counts as as a feeling and most people these days cannot manage even that sentiment of any kind and so it was and is and thus we do all the feeling for him

that is peter mendelsohn the novelist and designer who's also creative director at the Atlantic. He joins us from our studios in New York.

Thanks so much for being with us.

Thank you so much for having me.

Are the weepers feeling or acting like they're feeling?

I think it's a range.

You know, I think that everybody in this particular union who does this work,

I mean, it's obviously a magic realist conceit that this is a normalized thing in this particular union who does this work. I mean, it's obviously a magic realist

concede that this is a normalized thing in this country, although I gather that it is a normalized

profession in other countries. It's been going on for centuries, right? I mean,

...