In this thin volume, Eagleman ruminates on what exactly might happen after death. These short (very short, indeed; some are a page and a half long) stories suggest everything from a heaven so painstakingly created to be welcoming to everyone that everyone there believes they're in hell, to an afterlife in which you do all of the things you did while alive but in categorized chunks (six weeks waiting for a green light, 51 days deciding what to wear, three years swallowing food), to an afterlife populated by the gods of long-dead religions. Perhaps my favorite is the one in which God is obsessed with Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, since she's the only other being in existence who manages to understand the role of the creator, animating the inanimate.
Eagleman's writing is excellent in that it's both descriptive enough to give a clear snapshot of each afterlife and suggestively vague and concise enough that the reader can create his or her own assumptions about these ideas. These stories are sometimes silly, sometimes poignant, sometimes sad, but always thought-provoking. This is a good book. Read it.
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