Afterlives of the Saints is a woven gathering of groundbreaking essays that move through Renaissance anatomy and the Sistine Chapel, Borges' "Library of Babel," the history of spontaneous human combustion, the dangers of masturbation, the pleasures of castration, "and so forth" - each essay focusing on the story of a particular (and particularly strange) saint.

Colin Dickey is the author of Cranioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Lapham's Quarterly, Cabinet, TriQuarterly, and The Santa Monica Review. He is also coeditor (with Nicole Antebi and Robby Herbst) of Failure! Experiments in Aesthetic and Social Practices.