THE ART OF DYING: Writings, 2019-2022, by Peter Schjeldahl One day in 2019 the art critic Peter Schjeldahl was rushing to catch a bus. He leaped over a chunk of broken asphalt, caught a toe and fell.

The poem turned out, like “The Art of Dying,” to be a botched exit: Schjeldahl was back to writing criticism just a few years later. The Nation Weekly Fridays .

For 10 years, we were friends. But the pieces in his new posthumous collection, “The Art of Dying,” were all written after our once-intense correspondence dwindled almost to nothing.They were ...