`The Hard Clarity'

In the Wall Street Journal, Terry Teachout celebrates the quietly elegant, brave, witty, enduring work of L.E. Sissman: 

“The hard clarity with which he gazes into the abyss—and that, I have no doubt, is what he expected to find at the end of his own foreshortened road—is exceedingly hard to take if you're the kind of person who, like most of us, prefers to think about something else.”