"An expanded edition of the classic book on life and death in America"--Dust jacket. "Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Ticknor & Fields, in 1984, in different form. The pieces in this book first appeared in The New Yorker"--Title-page verso.
Contents:
A stranger with a camera -- I've always been clean -- Jim, Tex, and the one-armed man -- Sergei Kourdakov -- You always turn your head -- Harvey St. Jean had it made -- Partners -- Melisha Morganna Gibson -- Family problems -- Todo se paga -- It's just too late -- Called at Rushton -- Resettling the Yangs -- Among friends -- The mystery of Walter Bopp -- A father-son operation -- I've got problems -- Right-of-way -- Rumors around town -- Outdoor life -- At the train bridge -- Covering the cops.
Summary:
"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 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, Killings is more about how Americans live than about how some of them die. These stories, which originally appeared in The New Yorker between 1969 and 2010, are 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.
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