Weepers, Peter Mendelsund
Weepers, Peter Mendelsund
List: $19.99 | Sale: $13.99
Club: $9.99

Weepers
A Novel

Author: Peter Mendelsund

Narrator: David Aaron Baker

Unabridged: 8 hr 30 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 06/17/2025


Synopsis

Ed is a weeper. A professional weeper.

He's a card-carrying member of an eccentric union hired to cry at funerals, wakes, services, and burials. It's an odd job, but his services are sorely needed these days, as the town, the region, the country as a whole has become more or less numb. No one is able to summon a shred of human emotion whatsoever. Not anymore. (What'd be the point? The world's already gone to hell.)

So there's always work for Ed and his colleagues. But all those cries can wear a man down, and the tears don't flow quite like they used to, even for a consummate pro like Ed.

Then one morning, a stranger comes to town. A scrawny kid with no belongings, no parents, no name, no past. And at precisely the moment of his arrival, people begin to experience something new. Something strange. An onslaught of unbidden feelings, unfamiliar feelings, too many feelings.

A surrealist story of mourning and messiahs, deserts and droughts, cowboys and junkies, miracles and mass hysteria, the lure of despair and the solace of friendship. Peter Mendelsund's Weepers is a novel for this age: our age of anesthesia and anger.

Reviews

Goodreads review by The Speculative Shelf on February 25, 2025

A melancholy and surreal neo-Western about a band of professional mourners who offer their tear-laden eyes to a desiccated world. It evokes Station Eleven, with its troupe of performers bringing their artistry and gifts to a world now bereft of them. Our narrator, Ed, has a very distinct worldview an......more

Goodreads review by Lark on April 19, 2025

Peter Mendelsund is one of the most interesting writers around. I've read both What We See When We Read and Cover, both of which fascinated me because it was clear to me as I read that my inner world is nothing like Peter Mendelsund's, and yet he writes in boldly declarative sentences, as if he assu......more

Goodreads review by Carl on June 16, 2025

Mourning the dead is always a sight easier than loving the living Weepers is Peter Mendelsund’s surreal, twisted meditation on grief and emotional detachment in a world grown colder, grittier, and numb with time. Told through the intimate observations of professional weeper Ed, the reader frowns and......more

Goodreads review by nestle • whatnestleread on July 08, 2025

What a strange little book. It's somewhere between a novel on grief and surrealist character study? In a world where no one feels anything anymore, a whole profession has popped up just to simulate sorrow. Ed, our narrator, is a professional weeper (literally paid to cry at funerals) and through his......more

Goodreads review by Lori on April 22, 2025

A group for criers for hire. Professional weepers. To attend your funerals and turn on the waterworks. To fill the seats and set the mood. "I am a weeper as soon as I awake until the moment I sleep". Weepers puts a unique spin on grief fiction. Ed and his fellow co-workers willingly attend funerals,......more