David Rakoff's Last Deadline - NYTimes.com Anthony Pidgeon/Getty Images David Rakoff in 2010. David Rakoff's third book of essays, "Half Empty," came out in the fall of 2010, nine months after he learned that the pain he'd been experiencing in his left arm and shoulder was the result of a malignant sarcoma. David was an extraordinary essayist - the book won the Thurber Prize for American Humor, and, like his two previous collections, was a best seller - so it came as some surprise when he called his editor at Doubleday to say that he wanted his next book to be a novel written in rhyming iambic pentameter. "I will admit I paused for a very long time," Bill Thomas, the editor, said recently. A novel in verse. But David was extremely passionate about the project. He'd been ruminating on it for a decade. This was late 2010, and of course he was quite sick at this point; he'd been battling cancer for some time. But with a writer of David's caliber, who I personally loved and admired very much, I just said, "O.K., we'll figure out a way to publish it." " For the next year and a half, David wrote, between surgeries and chemotherapy regimens and in the face of the growing awareness that his cancer, as he put it, "would not be denied." The process of writing had always been an exercise in anguish management for him (he once said in an interview that writing was like having his teeth pulled out - through his penis), but to me and other friends, this book seemed different. He discussed the fate of his characters, he read passages to visitors from his bed, he sent e-mails saying he was feeling good because the writing had gone well that day. The last time I had dinner with David, about six weeks before he died, he was so weak that it was impossible to imagine him mustering the strength to work. But he was so close, he said. I need to finish it, and then I'll be ready. A week later, the book was done. "He rang me up and said, "The good news is, I have actually finished before my deadline" - which is an unusual call to get from an author," Mr. Thomas said. "And then he said, "The bad news is, you'll be publishing it posthumously." I read the manuscript and knew right away it was something exceptional. He poured his - I mean this literally - he poured his life into it: his ideas, his thoughts, his wit, his graciousness, his sense of tragedy. And he mastered this very difficult form. Ira Glass, a longtime friend of David's and the executive producer of the radio show "This American Life," said of the book: "Its dirty little secret is that David was probably a better novelist than he was an essayist. I mean, he was a great essayist, famous and all that, but that came so hard to him, and I think writing this, writing drama, gave him so much more pleasure. Over a series of meetings in David's apartment, he and Mr. Thomas began to plan the publication of "Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish," which will be released on July 16, less than a year since his death last August at the age of 47. The story spans decades, from turn-of-the-20th-century Chicago to midcentury Manhattan to San Francisco at the height of the AIDS crisis, and then to the near-present, when a grief-stricken man opens a wrapped box from long ago, and all the years - with the longings and indignities and small, eventful generosities they contain - collapse into a single moment. David wrote with biting wit about the inevitability of death and the futility of positive thinking - the "warning" sticker on "Half Empty" reads: "No inspirational life lessons will be found here" - but he lived a remarkably inspired life. In addition to being an essayist, he was an actor and playwright and screenwriter (the short film that he adapted and appeared in, "The New Tenants," won an Academy Award); he was a frequent and wildly popular contributor to "This American Life"; and as the many friends to whom he gave drawings and woodcuts and hand-painted boxes and tiny sculptures can attest, he was an extraordinary visual artist. He was extreme in both his generosity and his self-sufficiency; to be his friend meant to reckon with what felt like an imbalance in kindness. For the small circle of friends involved in the project of publishing his novel, this quality of David's only intensified their sense of urgency and their desire to bring it into the world - to a wider circle of readers who didn't know him - in a way that David would have wanted. "What is so special to me about the book," Mr. Thomas said, "is that it is the purest distillation of David's belief that we live in a world that is essentially cruel and indifferent, but there are remedies for that. And the remedies are kindness and beauty. It's very clever and erudite, and it's very, very funny, as David was, but fundamentally it is a brief for kindness. "I told him that this was the best thing he'd ever written," he continued. "David was his own worst critic to a fault, but he said, "I know it is." Which was not like him.