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CRIME & PUNISHMENT

· Bert Bevers: Notitie uit The Dallas School Book Depository, Texas · Death Tourism. Disaster Sites as Recreational Landscape Edited by Brigitte Sion · Death Blossoms. Reflections from a Prisoner of Conscience, Expanded Edition by Mumia Abu-Jamal · Making Evil: The Science Behind Humanity’s Dark Side by Dr Julia Shaw · Cahiers de prison : février-octobre 1946 de Louis-Ferdinand Céline · Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA): Death to the Fascist Insect · Deathwatch by Jean Genet · The Annotated Prison Writings of Oscar Wilde · Maudits mots. La fabrique des insultes racistes par Marie Treps · Nadine Akkerman: Invisible Agents Women and Espionage in Seventeenth-Century Britain · Conan Doyle for the defense. The True Story of a Sensational British Murder, a Quest for Justice, and the World’s Most Famous Detective Writer by Margalit Fox · Tori Telfer: Lady Killers. Deadly Women Throughout History

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Bert Bevers: Notitie uit The Dallas School Book Depository, Texas

 

Notitie uit The Dallas School
Book Depository, Texas

Lee Harvey Oswalds dagboekaantekening van 22 november 1963

Vandaag is onze Audrey al 33 dagen! Er zijn niet
heel veel mannen die hun kinderen en kleinkinderen
kunnen vertellen dat zij ooit hun president in levenden
lijve hebben aanschouwd. Het uitzicht op Dealey Plaza
is hier weids. Blij met mijn baantje, en mijn pauze.

Wie krijgt er nu de kans zoiets van zo nabij te zien? Oei,
ik laat een boer. Die cola was wel lekker maar ik dronk
net iets te snel. Daar buigt de stoet mijn richting op.
Ik zie hem zwaaien. Nooit eerder zag ik zulk roze als
dat van Jackie’s pakje. Aan dergelijke kleuren moeten

moeten ze hier wennen. Ze lijkt welhaast een Parisienne.
Op de gazons daar wuiven brave – wat hoor ik nou voor
koud geluid? Het doorladen van een wapen hier vlakbij?
En….Hé, ginds op die brug glanst de zon op een vizier.
Wie zijn dat? Waarom schouderen die gasten hun geweer?

Verrek….

Bert Bevers
Notitie uit The Dallas School
Book Depository, Texas
Lee Harvey Oswalds dagboekaantekening van 22 november 1963
Uit: Bedekte termen, Stabilitas loci, Antwerpen, 2023

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Death Tourism. Disaster Sites as Recreational Landscape Edited by Brigitte Sion

Auschwitz. Hiroshima. Cambodia’s killing fields. The World Trade Center. The mass graves of Rwanda.

These places of violent death have become part of the recreational landscape of tourism, an industry that is otherwise dedicated to pleasure and escape. In dark places like concentration camps, prisons, battlegrounds, and the sites of natural disasters, how are memory and trauma mediated by thanotourism, or tourism of death?

In Death Tourism, Brigitte Sion brings together essays by some of the most trenchant voices in the field to look at the tensions created by the juxtaposition of human remains and food stands, political agendas and educational programs, economic development and architectural ambition.

How does a state redefine its national identity after catastrophic trauma?

And what is the role of this kind of tourism in defining their new identity?

A timely volume on an irresistible subject, this inquiry exposes the intersection of leisure with the inhumane, giving insight into how people respectfully share a public space that is both free and sacred, compelling and tragic.

Death Tourism.
Disaster Sites as Recreational Landscape
Edited by Brigitte Sion
Seagull Books
Publication Year: 2014
Format: Paperback
Pages: 356
illustrations
2014
ISBN: 9780857421074
$35

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Death Tourism.
Disaster Sites as Recreational Landscape
by Brigitte Sion

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Death Blossoms. Reflections from a Prisoner of Conscience, Expanded Edition by Mumia Abu-Jamal

Profound meditations on life, death, freedom, family, and faith, written by radical Black journalist, Mumia Abu-Jamal, while he was awaiting his execution.

During the spring of 1996, black journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal was living on death row and expecting to be executed for a crime he steadfastly maintained he did not commit—the murder of a white Philadelphia police officer. It was in that period, with the likelihood of execution looming over him, that he received visits from members of the Bruderhof spiritual community––refugees from Hitler’s Germany––anti-fascist, anti-racist, and deeply opposed to the death penalty. Inspired by the encounters, Mumia hand-wrote Death Blossoms—a series of short essays and personal vignettes reflecting on his search for spiritual meaning, freedom, and truth in a deeply racist and materialistic society.

Featuring a new introduction by Mumia and a report by Amnesty International detailing how his trial was “in violation of minimum international standards,” this new edition of Death Blossoms is essential reading for the Black Lives Matter era, and is destined to endure as a classic in American prison literature.

“In this revised edition of his groundbreaking work, Death Blossoms, convicted death row prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal tackles hard and existential questions, searching for God and a greater meaning in a caged life that may be cut short if the state has its way and takes his life. As readers follow Mumia’s journey through his poems, short essays, and longer musings, they will learn not only about this singular individual who has retained his humanity despite the ever present threat of execution, but also about themselves and our society: what we are willing to tolerate and who we are willing to cast aside. If there is any justice, Mumia will prevail in his battle for his life and for his freedom.”––Lara Bazelon, author of Rectify: The Power of Restorative Justice After Wrongful Conviction

“Mumia Abu-Jamal has challenged us to see the prison at the center of a long history of US oppression, and he has inspired us to keep faith with ordinary struggles against injustice under the most terrible odds and circumstances. Written more than two decades ago, Death Blossoms helps us to see beyond prison walls; it is as timely and as necessary as the day it was published.”––Nikhil Pal Singh, founding faculty director of the NYU Prison Eduction Program, author of Race and America’s Long War.

Title: Death Blossoms
Subtitle: Reflections from a Prisoner of Conscience, Expanded Edition
Author: Mumia Abu-Jamal
Foreword: Cornel West
Introduction by Mumia Abu-Jamal
Preface by Julia Wright
Publisher: City Lights Publishers
Tags: African American history, black lives matter, black panther party, death row, injustice, institutional injustice, mass incarceration, prison industrial complex, prison writing, racial injustice, U.S. political prisoners, white supremacy
Format: Paperback
ISBN-10 0872867978
ISBN-13 9780872867970
Publication Date; 12 November 2019
Main content page count 240
List Price $16.95

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Mumia Abu-Jamal
Death Blossoms
Reflections from a Prisoner of Conscience

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Making Evil: The Science Behind Humanity’s Dark Side by Dr Julia Shaw

A smart and highly readable exploration of why we think and do bad things.

Dr Julia Shaw shows us that the same dispositions that make us capable of heinous crimes may also work to our advantage. And, if evil is within all of us, should it be said to exist at all?

In Making Evil, Shaw uses a compelling mix of science, popular culture and real life examples to break down timely and important issues. How similar is your brain to a psychopath’s? How many people have murder fantasies? Can A.I. be evil? Do your sexual proclivities make you a bad person? Who becomes a terrorist?

Dr Julia Shaw is a scientist in the Department of Psychology at University College London (UCL). Her academic work, teaching and role as an expert witness have focused on different ways of understanding criminal behaviour. Dr Shaw has consulted as an expert on criminal cases, delivered police-training and military workshops, and has evaluated offender diversion programs. She is also the co-founder of Spot, a start-up that helps employees report workplace harassment and discrimination, and employers take action. Her work has been featured in outlets such as CNN, the BBC, the New Yorker, WIRED, Forbes, the Guardian and Der Spiegel.

Making Evil: The Science Behind Humanity’s Dark Side
Dr Julia Shaw (Author)
Publisher: Canongate Books
Main edition (7 Feb. 2019)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1786891301
ISBN-13: 978-1786891303
Hardcover: 320 pages
Feb 2019
Product Dimensions: 14.4 x 3 x 22 cm

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Making Evil
Dr Julia Shaw
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Cahiers de prison : février-octobre 1946 de Louis-Ferdinand Céline

En décembre 1945, Louis-Ferdinand Céline est arrêté à Copenhague, où il s’était réfugié avec Lucette et son chat Bébert et tentait d’écrire la suite de Guignol’s band.

LThis image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is celine-prison.jpge dénommé Destouches, immédiatement incarcéré à la prison de l’Ouest, réclame de quoi écrire. L’administration pénitentiaire lui fournit dix cahiers d’écolier de 32 pages avec des règles à respecter : « On ne doit pas écrire sur l’affaire dont on est justiciable ni sur la détention. Tout propos licencieux et malséant est également interdit. »

À partir de février 1946, le prisonnier note d’emblée des éléments de défense pour empêcher son extradition dans la France de l’épuration, et s’en prend à l’ambassadeur Charbonnières qui le persécute. Mais Céline est repris par l’écriture et les Cahiers de prison dévoilent sa vie après son arrivée au Danemark, sa relation avec Lucette, des souvenirs de Londres ou de Montmartre, et surtout montrent de manière inédite le Céline lecteur. Isolé dans la cellule 609 de la section K., Céline s’entoure de livres apportés par sa femme et cite abondamment Chateaubriand, Hugo, Chamfort, Voltaire, etc., en se comparant avec les « grands écrivains exilés emprisonnés ». Les Cahiers illustrent aussi la transition littéraire vers sa « seconde révolution narrative et stylistique », note Jean Paul Louis, avec la mise en chantier de Féerie pour une autre fois, et des passages que l’on retrouvera dans D’un château l’autre, Nord et Rigodon.

Ce volume des Cahiers de la NRF constitue la première édition originale et intégrale des Cahiers de prison de Céline. Avec un nouveau travail d’établissement du texte et des notes, ainsi qu’un index centré sur les noms d’auteurs et les titres d’oeuvres, Céline nous apparaît tel qu’en lui-même, obsédé par la littérature et sa condition d’écrivain : « C’est moi maintenant le traître, le monstre, c’est moi qu’on s’apprête à lyncher. »

Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Cahiers de prison (Février – octobre 1946)
Édition de Jean Paul Louis
Collection Les Cahiers de la NRF,
Série Céline (n° 13), Gallimard
Parution : 23-05-2019
240 pages
sous couverture décorée, 140 x 205 mm
Achevé d’imprimer : 01-05-2019
Genre : Mémoires et autobiographies
Thème : littérature
Catégorie – Sous-catégorie :
Littérature française
Mémoires et autobiographies
Époque : XXe siècle
ISBN : 9782072852695
Gencode : 9782072852695
Code distributeur : G03149
Broché
EUR 20,00

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Cahiers de prison

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Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA): Death to the Fascist Insect

DEATH TO THE FASCIST INSECT is a compilation of the writings and transcribed recordings of the Symbionese Liberation Army (1973–75), a radical left-wing group based in the Bay Area of California. This publication chronicles the militant, if half-baked, political theories that inspired the SLA, as well as the ways that the SLA used violence and manipulation of the media to further the group’s goal of provoking armed revolution from the underground.

Founded by escaped convict Donald DeFreeze, aka Field Marshal Cinque, the SLA was mostly composed of young, largely white and middle-class men and women, whose stated aim was to destroy all forms of racism, sexism, and capitalism. One of the SLA’s first acts was the murder of the Oakland superintendent of schools; SLA members went on to kidnap newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst, demand millions of dollars from her wealthy family for free food for “people in need,” and rob a bank in San Francisco with Hearst. Most of the SLA, including DeFreeze, died in a fire after a gun battle with police in Los Angeles, while Hearst was later pardoned.

This publication features an introduction by editor John Brian King, a chronology of the SLA, the writings and transcribed recordings of the group presented in the context of events at the time, and a fifty-page appendix of notable articles, letters, and other texts related to the SLA.

John Brian King is a writer, photographer, and filmmaker. His works include the nonfiction book Lustmord: The Writings and Artifacts of Murderers (1997), the photography books LAX: Photographs of Los Angeles 1980-84 (2015) and Nude Reagan (2016), and the feature film Redlands (2014).

Death to the Fascist Insect
John Brian King, Editor
Publisher: Spurl Editions
Product Number: 9781943679089
ISBN 978-1-943679-08-9
SKU #: C17B
Binding: Paperback
Pages: 232
Literary Nonfiction
California Interest
African & African American Studies
Political Theory. Crime
Price: $ 18.50
Pub Date: 3/13/2019

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SLA – Symbionese Liberation Army
Death to the Fascist Insect

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Deathwatch by Jean Genet

Deathwatch, Jean Genet‘s earliest, shortest and most formally straightforward play, was first performed in Paris in 1949.

It retains an intense power and makes an excellent introduction to his later dramas – The Maids, The Balcony, The Blacks, The Screens. The French text of Deathwatch, published by Gallimard, was extensively altered by Genet during rehearsal; and Bernard Frechtman’s translation is of the final ‘performance’ version, which supersedes the original published text.Three convicts share a cramped prison cell.

There is no question as to which of them is the dominant dog in the pack: Green Eyes (Yeux-Verts) has brutally murdered a woman and is to be executed.

Lefranc and the younger novice-like Maurice are inside for less grave crimes. But both of them covet Green Eyes’ attention, baiting each other in the process, a duel that drives inexorably toward violence

Three young convicts share a cell. Locked into a world of dangerous rivalries, criminals Lefranc and Maurice compete for the attention of the charismatic condemned man, Green-Eyes.

Informed by his own experience in French prisons, Jean Genet’s first play, Deathwatch is an explosive exploration of the inversion of moral order.

Genet was one of the most prominent and provocative writers of the twentieth century.

Jean Genet’s Deathwatch premiered in this translation by David Rudkin with the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1987 and was revived at the Print Room, London, in April 2016.

Jean Genet was born in Paris in 1910. An illegitimate child who never knew his parents, he was abandoned to the Public Assistance Authorities. He was ten when he was sent to a reformatory for stealing; thereafter he spent time in the prisons of nearly every country he visited in thirty years of prowling through the European underworld. With ten convictions for theft in France to his credit he was, the eleventh time, condemned to life imprisonment. Eventually he was granted a pardon by President Auriol as a result of appeals from France’s leading artists and writers led by Jean Cocteau. His first novel, Our Lady of the Flowers, was written while he was in prison, followed by Miracle of the Rose, the autobiographical The Thief’s Journal, Querelle of Brest and Funeral Rites. He wrote six plays: The Balcony, The Blacks, The Screens, The Maids, Deathwatch and Splendid’s (the manuscript of which was rediscovered only in 1993). Jean Genet died in 1986.

Deathwatch
by Jean Genet
English
Translated by David Rudkin
Play
Faber & Faber
Paperback
64 pages
2016
ISBN 9780571332618
£9.99

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The Annotated Prison Writings of Oscar Wilde

“And I? May I say nothing, my lord?” With these words, Oscar Wilde’s courtroom trials came to a close. The lord in question, High Court justice Sir Alfred Wills, sent Wilde to the cells, sentenced to two years in prison with hard labor for the crime of “gross indecency” with other men.

As cries of “shame” emanated from the gallery, the convicted aesthete was roundly silenced.

But he did not remain so. Behind bars and in the period immediately after his release, Wilde wrote two of his most powerful works—the long autobiographical letter De Profundis and an expansive best-selling poem, The Ballad of Reading Gaol.

In The Annotated Prison Writings of Oscar Wilde, Nicholas Frankel collects these and other prison writings, accompanied by historical illustrations and his rich facing-page annotations. As Frankel shows, Wilde experienced prison conditions designed to break even the toughest spirit, and yet his writings from this period display an imaginative and verbal brilliance left largely intact.

Wilde also remained politically steadfast, determined that his writings should inspire improvements to Victorian England’s grotesque regimes of punishment. But while his reformist impulse spoke to his moment, Wilde also wrote for eternity.

At once a savage indictment of the society that jailed him and a moving testimony to private sufferings, Wilde’s prison writings—illuminated by Frankel’s extensive notes—reveal a very different man from the famous dandy and aesthete who shocked and amused the English-speaking world.

Nicholas Frankel is Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University.

“Frankel provides a valuable service in comprehensively editing these works for a fresh generation of readers.” — Joseph Bristow, University of California, Los Angeles

The Annotated Prison Writings of Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde
Edited by Nicholas Frankel
Harvard University Press
Paperback
408 pages
Publication: May 2018
ISBN 9780674984387
€17.00

# more books
The Annotated Prison Writings of Oscar Wilde
-Clemency Petition to the Home Secretary, 2 July 1896
-De Profundis
-Letter to the Daily Chronicle, 27 May 1897
-The Ballad of Reading Gaol
-Letter to the Daily Chronicle, 23 March 1898

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Maudits mots. La fabrique des insultes racistes par Marie Treps

La linguiste Marie Treps retrace l’histoire des insultes racistes dans Maudits mots.

La linguiste effectue un inventaire des insultes racistes au fil du temps, à partir de citations issues de textes anciens ou contemporains. Elle retrace les circonstances historiques dans lesquelles elles ont été imaginées ainsi que les motivations.

“Maudits” mots fournit un inventaire détaillé des termes et des expressions produits, au cours de notre histoire, par la xénophobie ordinaire ou par le racisme exacerbé.

Marie Treps dissèque les multiples insultes adressées aux Allemands, aux Arabes, aux Asiatiques, aux Espagnols, aux Italiens, aux Juifs, et à bien d’autres groupes ainsi réduits à l’état de stéréotypes, voire déshumanisés.

En linguiste et en sémiologue, Marie Treps ausculte tout un lexique qui vise à dégrader, à stigmatiser, à outrager, qui est parfois naïf, faussement affectueux, ou qui se donne une apparence scientifique. L’analyse s’appuie sur des textes anciens et contemporains, dont beaucoup appartiennent à la littérature.

Linguiste et sémiologue, Marie TREPS a publié une quinzaine d’ouvrages consacrés à la langue française, notamment, Les Mots voyageurs, Seuil, 2003 ; Les Mots migrateurs, Seuil, 2009 ; Les Mots-caresses, CNRS Editions, 2011 ; Oh là là, ces Français ! La Librairie Vuibert, 2015.

Marie Treps:
Maudits mots. La fabrique des insultes racistes
Broché: 327 pages
Editeur: Tohu-Bohu éditions
Collection: TOHU BOHU
Langue: Français
2017
ISBN : 978-2-37622-012-1
Dimensions: 15 x 20 cm
€ 20,00

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Maudits mots.
La fabrique des insultes racistes
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Nadine Akkerman: Invisible Agents Women and Espionage in Seventeenth-Century Britain

A compelling history of women in seventeenth century espionage, telling the forgotten tales of women from all walks of life who acted as spies in early modern Britain.

Nadine Akkerman has immersed herself in archives and letter collections, acting as a modern-day Spymistress to unearth plots and conspiracies that have long been hidden by history.

It would be easy for the modern reader to conclude that women had no place in the world of early modern espionage, with a few seventeenth-century women spies identified and then relegated to the footnotes of history.

If even the espionage carried out by Susan Hyde, sister of Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, during the turbulent decades of civil strife in Britain can escape the historiographer’s gaze, then how many more like her lurk in the archives?

Nadine Akkerman’s search for an answer to this question has led to the writing of Invisible Agents, the very first study to analyse the role of early modern women spies, demonstrating that the allegedly-male world of the spy was more than merely infiltrated by women.

This compelling and ground-breaking contribution to the history of espionage details a series of case studies in which women – from playwright to postmistress, from lady-in-waiting to laundry woman – acted as spies, sourcing and passing on confidential information on account of political and religious convictions or to obtain money or power.

The struggle of the She-Intelligencers to construct credibility in their own time is mirrored in their invisibility in modern historiography.

Akkerman has immersed herself in archives, libraries, and private collections, transcribing hundreds of letters, breaking cipher codes and their keys, studying invisible inks, and interpreting riddles, acting as a modern-day Spymistress to unearth plots and conspiracies that have long remained hidden by history.

Nadine Akkerman is Reader in early modern English Literature at Leiden University and Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. She is author of the critically acclaimed Invisible Agents: Women and Espionage in Seventeenth-Century Britain (OUP), and of The Correspondence of Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia (OUP), the third and final volume of which will be published in 2020, and is currently writing the definitive biography of Elizabeth Stuart. She has also published extensively on women’s history, diplomacy, and masques, and curated several exhibitions, including the popular Courtly Rivals at the Haags Historisch Museum. In 2017 she was elected to The Young Academy of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, and received a Special Recognition Award from the World Cultural Council.

Invisible Agents
Women and Espionage in Seventeenth-Century Britain
Nadine Akkerman
Language: English
Oxford University Press
Hardcover
288 pages
Published: 12 July 2018
8 colour plates & 12 black and white images
234x156mm
ISBN-10: 0198823010
ISBN-13: 978-0198823018
£20.00

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Nadine Akkerman:
Invisible Agents

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Conan Doyle for the defense. The True Story of a Sensational British Murder, a Quest for Justice, and the World’s Most Famous Detective Writer by Margalit Fox

For all the scores of biographies of Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the most famous detective in the world, there is no recent book that tells this remarkable story—in which Conan Doyle becomes a real-life detective on an actual murder case.

In Conan Doyle for the Defense, Margalit Fox takes us step by step inside Conan Doyle’s investigative process and illuminates a murder mystery that is also a morality play for our time—a story of ethnic, religious, and anti-immigrant bias.

In 1908, a wealthy woman was brutally murdered in her Glasgow home. The police found a convenient suspect in Oscar Slater—an immigrant Jewish cardsharp—who, despite his obvious innocence, was tried, convicted, and consigned to life at hard labor in a brutal Scottish prison.

Conan Doyle, already world famous as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, was outraged by this injustice and became obsessed with the case. Using the methods of his most famous character, he scoured trial transcripts, newspaper accounts, and eyewitness statements, meticulously noting myriad holes, inconsistencies, and outright fabrications by police and prosecutors. Finally, in 1927, his work won Slater’s freedom.

Margalit Fox, a celebrated longtime writer for The New York Times, has “a nose for interesting facts, the ability to construct a taut narrative arc, and a Dickens-level gift for concisely conveying personality” (Kathryn Schulz, New York). In Conan Doyle for the Defense, she immerses readers in the science of Edwardian crime detection and illuminates a watershed moment in the history of forensics, when reflexive prejudice began to be replaced by reason and the scientific method.

A senior writer at The New York Times, Margalit Fox is considered one of the foremost explanatory writers and literary stylists in American journalism. As a member of the newspaper’s celebrated obituary news department, she has written front-page send-offs of some of the leading cultural figures of our age. (Conan Doyle for the Defense is in many ways a fond belated obituary for the long-overlooked Oscar Slater, an immigrant everyman treated inexcusably by history.) Fox’s previous book, The Riddle of the Labyrinth, won the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. She lives in Manhattan with her husband, the writer and critic George Robinson.

Conan Doyle for the Defense
The True Story of a Sensational British Murder, a Quest for Justice, and the World’s Most Famous Detective Writer
By Margalit Fox
Illustrated
Hardcover
Published by Random House
Random House
$27.00
Jun 26, 2018
352 Pages
ISBN 9780399589454

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Tori Telfer: Lady Killers. Deadly Women Throughout History

Author Tori Telfer’s “Lady Killers,” a thrilling and entertaining compendium, investigates female serial killers and their crimes through the ages.

When you think of serial killers throughout history, the names that come to mind are ones like Jack the Ripper, John Wayne Gacy, and Ted Bundy. But what about Tillie Klimek, Moulay Hassan, Kate Bender?

The narrative we’re comfortable with is the one where women are the victims of violent crime, not the perpetrators. In fact, serial killers are thought to be so universally, overwhelmingly male that in 1998, FBI profiler Roy Hazelwood infamously declared in a homicide conference, “There are no female serial killers.”

Lady Killers, based on the popular online series that appeared on Jezebel and The Hairpin, disputes that claim and offers fourteen gruesome examples as evidence.

Though largely forgotten by history, female serial killers such as Erzsébet Báthory, Nannie Doss, Mary Ann Cotton, and Darya Nikolayevna Saltykova rival their male counterparts in cunning, cruelty, and appetite for destruction.

Lady Killers
Deadly Women Throughout History
by Tori Telfer
2017
ISBN: 9780062433732
ISBN 10: 0062433733
Imprint: Harper Perennial
Pages: 352
List Price: 15.99 USD
TRUE CRIME – Murder- Serial Killers -History – Women
Illustrations by Dame Darcy

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