True Crime

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Editor's Note

We envisioned the theme of True Crime as a way to engage with our country’s voyeuristic obsession with rogues and outlaws, the Starkweathers marauding our badlands. Justin St. Germain, in his essay “Murder Tourism in Middle America,” returns to Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and visits the Kansas village of Holcomb as a way to confront his own mother’s murder. The fiction writers take us into the gray, Tayari Jones exploring a night in question in an excerpt from her new novel, An American Marriage, and in her short story “Rescue,” Karen Shepard unravels a tight-knit community’s reluctance to face the truth about a deadly hit-and- run. Hafizah Geter’s searing “Testimony” series of four poems—for Eric Garner, for Michael Brown, for Sandra Bland, for Tamir Rice—gives voices to those silenced by police brutality. Claire McQuerry’s poems view the American dream through the jaundiced lens of the subprime mortgage scandal. And Matthew Zapruder’s “Paul Ryan” is a grand indictment that offers the rarest gifts—grace and transcendence from our current criminal state. Where there is friction, there is fire. We hope that this incendiary issue burns clear and bright.

Note: eBooks of True Crime are not available.