Coronado High by Joshuah Bearman – How a gang of surfers ran one of the biggest smuggling operations in history The Greatest Heist in British History by Mark Seal – How a ragtag gang of retirees pulled off the biggest jewel heist in British history The Accidental Get Away Driver …
Read More »10 Great Essays by James Baldwin
Stranger in the Village – From all available evidence no black man had ever set foot in this tiny Swiss village before I came… Notes of a Native Son – On the 29th of July, in 1943, my father died. On the same day, a few hours later, his last child was …
Read More »10 Great Essays by James Baldwin
Stranger in the Village – From all available evidence no black man had ever set foot in this tiny Swiss village before I came… Notes of a Native Son – On the 29th of July, in 1943, my father died. On the same day, a few hours later, his last child was …
Read More »15 Basement Bar Designs To Finish Off That Man Cave
Transforming the basement into something a bit more cozy and fun for the boys is a nice sentiment, but if all you’ve got is a couch down there, you’re just not doing the space or your beau justice. Why not add a bar to round it out? Below, you’ll be …
Read More »James M. Cain and the West Virginia Mine Wars
SEPTEMBER 25, 2018 IN 1922, James M. Cain traveled to the coal fields of southern West Virginia to cover the treason trial of union organizer Bill Blizzard. Cain was a young, ambitious journalist working for the Baltimore Sun. His time as a best-selling novelist, a Hollywood screenwriter, and a giant …
Read More »Our Dead Man in Havana
SEPTEMBER 23, 2018 LAURA VAN DEN BERG’S 2015 novel, Find Me, tells one woman’s tale of surviving the post-apocalypse. In the first half, her world is clearly demarcated, a sterile hospital facility that keeps the survivors of an outbreak separated from the world outside. The second half takes place after …
Read More »The Storytelling Sorcery of Super Short Fiction in “New Micro”
SEPTEMBER 21, 2018 NEW MICRO: EXCEPTIONALLY SHORT FICTION, edited by James Thomas and Robert Scotellaro, collects 135 stories of fewer than 300 words written by 89 different authors. The diversity makes the experience of reading it rather like approaching a series of tide pools and dipping one’s face into one …
Read More »Man Booker Prize Shortlist Features a Novel Told in Verse
LONDON — The shortlist for this year’s Man Booker Prize, one of the world’s most prestigious literary awards, includes for the first time a book told in verse, the prize committee announced at a news conference in London on Thursday. “The Long Take,” by the poet Robin Robertson, mixes verse, …
Read More »Reclaiming Power Through Humanity: On Michelle McNamara and “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark”
SEPTEMBER 17, 2018 “I THINK YOU BAILED when the world began to change,” writes journalist Michelle McNamara in an imagined letter to the Golden State Killer in the epilogue of her true crime memoir, I’ll Be Gone in the Dark. She is offering a hypothesis to explain why the psychopath …
Read More »David Yallop, Who Wrote of Crime and Conspiracy, Dies at 81
But “In God’s Name” spent 15 weeks on The Times’s best-seller list and won the Crime Writers’ Association’s Gold Dagger award for nonfiction in 1984. According to news reports and a foreword to a recent edition, the book has been translated into more than 30 languages and has sold more …
Read More »