Dr. Paul Koudounaris spent over a decade traveling the world to study pet cemeteries, animal memorials, and various traditions for saying final goodbyes to cherished pets. In his research he discovered far more than the burials of cats and dogs. What he discovered were graves for everything from flies to elephants, but no matter how disparate the species and how far removed geographically, all had one thing in common: each of them were beloved to a human companion. This conversation on Faithful Unto Death: Pet Cemeteries and Animal Burials will be accompanied by an evocative selection of photos from his new book on the topic. Ranging from Victorian English cat graves to caskets for horned toads in the Wild West to glass doghouse tombs in Bolivia, this promises to be a talk that is sometimes weird, often fascinating, and entirely touching.

$10/$5 Digital Connection. Free for MTH&M members. REGISTER HERE.

Copies of Faithful Unto Death are available for purchase through the Mark Twain Store; proceeds benefit The Mark Twain House & Museum. Books will be shipped after the event. We regret that we are NOT able to ship books outside the United States as it is cost-prohibitive to do so.

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About the Author:

Dr. Paul Koudounaris is a PhD in Art History living in Las Vegas. An author and photographer, his previous books include three on death (Empire of Death, Heavenly Bodies, and Memento Mori) and one on feline history (A Cat’s Tale, a Barnes and Noble book of the year in 2020). His new book combines his interest in funeral and animal history, and is the product of an exhaustive, ten year study of pet cemeteries and animal burial sites around the world.

About the Moderator:

Loren Rhoads is the author of 222 Cemeteries to See Before You Die and Wish You Were Here: Adventures in Cemetery Travel. She’s the editor of Death’s Garden: Relationships with Cemeteries and its sequel, Death’s Garden Revisited: Personal Relationships with Cemeteries. She’s written about cemeteries for Gothic Beauty, Mental Floss, Atlas Obscura, and more. She’s lectured about cemeteries at the Association for Gravestone Studies conference, the Horror Writers Association’s Stoker Weekend, and the Science Fiction Writers Association’s Nebula Conference, and more.

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Virtual author programs are supported by Suzanne Hopgood in the memory of former MTH&M Trustee Frank Lord.