Killings
Sign in to keep track of books you’ve read and want to read.
True stories of sudden death in the classic collection by a master of American journalism.
Reporters love murders, Calvin Trillin writes in the introduction to Killings.In a pinch, what the lawyers call wrongful death will do, particularly if it's sudden.Killings,first published in 1984 and expanded for this edition, shows Trillin to be such a reporter, drawn time after time to tales of sudden death. But Trillin is attracted less by violence or police procedure than by the way the fabric of people's lives is suddenly exposed when someone comes to an untimely end. As Trillin says, Killingsis more about how Americans live than about how some of them die.
Read more
These stories, which originally appeared in The New Yorkerbetween 1969 and 2010, are vivid portraits of lives cut short. An upstanding farmer in Iowa finds himself drastically changed by a woman he meets in a cocktail lounge. An eccentric old man in Eastern Kentucky is enraged by the presence of a documentary filmmaker. Two women move to a bucolic Virginia county to find peace, only to end up at war over a shared road. Mexican American families in California hand down a feud from generation to generation. A high-living criminal-defense lawyer in Miami acquires any number of enemies capable of killing him.
Liked Killings? Here’s where I’d start.
These suit anyone who liked Killings. Sign in and mark a few books for picks shaped around your own taste.
-
The Best American Crime Reporting 2008 Shares true crime, nonfiction, crime -
The Best American Crime Writing 2005 Shares true crime, nonfiction, crime -
The Best American Crime Writing: 2003 Edition: The Year's Best True Crime Reporting Shares true crime, nonfiction, crime -
Fatal Charms and Other Tales of Today/The Mansions of Limbo Shares nonfiction, true crime, essays
