Download or read book Notes on an Execution written by Danya Kukafka and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2022-01-25 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • WINNER OF THE 2023 EDGAR AWARD FOR BEST NOVEL • NEW YORK TIMES BEST CRIME NOVEL OF THE YEAR “Defiantly populated with living women . . . beautifully drawn, dense with detail and specificity . . . Notes on an Execution is nuanced, ambitious and compelling.” —Katie Kitamura, NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (Editors' Choice) "A searing portrait of the complicated women caught in the orbit of a serial killer. . . . Compassionate and thought-provoking." –BRIT BENNETT, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Vanishing Half Recommended by New York Times Book Review • Los Angeles Times • Washington Post • Entertainment Weekly • Esquire • Good Housekeeping • USA Today • Buzzfeed • Goodreads • Real Simple • Marie Claire • Rolling Stone • Business Insider • Bustle • PopSugar • The Millions • The Guardian • and many more! In the tradition of Long Bright River and The Mars Room, a gripping and atmospheric work of literary suspense that deconstructs the story of a serial killer on death row, told primarily through the eyes of the women in his life—from the bestselling author of Girl in Snow. Ansel Packer is scheduled to die in twelve hours. He knows what he’s done, and now awaits execution, the same chilling fate he forced on those girls, years ago. But Ansel doesn’t want to die; he wants to be celebrated, understood. Through a kaleidoscope of women—a mother, a sister, a homicide detective—we learn the story of Ansel’s life. We meet his mother, Lavender, a seventeen-year-old girl pushed to desperation; Hazel, twin sister to Ansel’s wife, inseparable since birth, forced to watch helplessly as her sister’s relationship threatens to devour them all; and finally, Saffy, the detective hot on his trail, who has devoted herself to bringing bad men to justice but struggles to see her own life clearly. As the clock ticks down, these three women sift through the choices that culminate in tragedy, exploring the rippling fissures that such destruction inevitably leaves in its wake. Blending breathtaking suspense with astonishing empathy, Notes on an Execution presents a chilling portrait of womanhood as it simultaneously unravels the familiar narrative of the American serial killer, interrogating our system of justice and our cultural obsession with crime stories, asking readers to consider the false promise of looking for meaning in the psyches of violent men. "Poetic and mesmerizing . . . Powerful, important, intensely human, and filled with a unique examination of tragedy, one where the reader is left with a curious emotion: hope." —USA TODAY “A profound and staggering experience of empathy that challenges us to confront what it means to be human in our darkest moments. . . . I relished every page of this brilliant and gripping masterpiece."—ASHLEY AUDRAIN, New York Times bestselling author of The Push

Download or read book My Experiences as an Executioner written by James Berry and published by Read Books Ltd. This book was released on 2021-06-24 with total page 131 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “My Experiences as an Executioner” is a 1892 memoir by English executioner James Berry (1852–1913). Berry was most notable for his contribution to the science of hanging, refining the long drop method developed by William Marwood so as to reduce the mental and physical suffering of those hanged. In this volume, Berry offers insights into the various methods he employed as an executioner and what it was like witnessing people's final moments. Contents include: “The Executioner at Home by H. Snowden Ward”, “How I Became an Executioner”, “My First Execution”, “My Method of Execution”, “Other Methods of Execution”, “Two Terrible Experiences”, “How Murderers Die”, “From the Murderer’s Point of View”, “On Capital Punishment”, etc. Read & Co. History is proudly republishing this classic memoir now in a brand new edition complete with the introductory essay “On Anne Green, Her Execution” by John Mainard.

Download or read book Literary Executions written by John Cyril Barton and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2014-07-15 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In Literary Executions, John Barton analyzes nineteenth-century representations of, responses to, and arguments for and against the death penalty in the United States. The author creates a generative dialogue between artistic relics and legal history. Novels, short stories, poems, and creative nonfiction engage with legislative reports, trial transcripts, legal documents, newspaper and journal articles, treatises, and popular books (like The Record of Crimes and The Gallows, the Prison, and the Poor House), all of which participated in the debate over capital punishment. Barton focuses on several canonical figures--James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Lydia Maria Child, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and Theodore Dreiser--and offers new readings of their work in light of the death penalty controversy. Barton also gives close attention to a host of then-popular-but-now-forgotten writers--particularly John Neal, Slidell MacKenzie, William Gilmore Simms, Sylvester Judd, and George Lippard--whose work helped shape or was in turn shaped by the influential anti-gallows movement. As illustrated in the book's epigraph by Samuel Johnson -- "Depend upon it Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully" -- Barton argues that the high stakes of capital punishment dramatize the confrontation between the citizen-subject and sovereign authority. In bringing together the social and the aesthetic, Barton traces the emergence of the modern State's administration of lawful death. The book is intended primarily for literary scholars, but cultural and legal historians will also find value in it, as will anyone interested in the intersections among law, culture, and the humanities"--

Download or read book Execution Culture in Nineteenth Century Britain written by Helen Rutherford and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This edited collection offers multi-disciplinary reflections and analysis on a variety of themes centred on nineteenth century executions in the UK, many specifically related to the fundamental change in capital punishment culture as the execution moved from the public arena to behind the prison wall. By examining a period of dramatic change in punishment practice, this collection of essays provides a fresh historical perspective on nineteenth century execution culture, with a focus on Scotland, Wales and the regions of England. Public Spectacle to Hidden Ritual has two parts. Part 1 addresses the criminal body and the witnessing of executions in the nineteenth century, including studies of the execution crowd and executioners' memoirs, as well as reflections on the experience of narratives around capital punishment in museums in the present day. Part 2 explores the treatment of the execution experience in the print media, from the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. The collection draws together contributions from the fields of Heritage and Museum Studies; History; Law; Legal History and Literary Studies, to shed new light upon execution culture in nineteenth century Britain. The volume will be of interest to students and academics, in the fields of criminology; heritage and museum studies; history; law; legal history; medical humanities, and socio-legal studies"--

Download or read book Pictures at an Execution written by Wendy Lesser and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1998-07-21 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about murder - in life and in art - and about how we look at it and feel about it. At the centre of Wendy Lesser's investigation is a legal case in which a federal court judge was asked to decide whether a gas chamber execution would be broadcast on public television. Lesser conducts us through the proceedings, pausing along the way to reflect on the circumstances of violent death in our culture. Her book is also a meditation on murder in a civilized society - what we make of it in law, morality and art.

Download or read book A Hangman s Diary written by Franz Schmidt and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2015-02-03 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From 1573 to 1617, Master Franz Schmidt was the executioner for the towns of Bamberg and Nuremberg. During that span, he personally executed more than 350 people while keeping a journal throughout his career. A Hangman’s Diary is not only a collection of detailed writings by Schmidt about his work, but also an account of criminal procedure in Germany during the Middle Ages. With analysis and explanation, editor Albrecht Keller and translators C. Calvert and A. W. Gruner have put together a masterful tome that sets the scene of execution day and puts you in Master Franz Schmidt’s shoes as he does his duty for his country. Originally published more than eighty years ago, A Hangman’s Diary gives a year-by-year breakdown on all of Master Schmidt’s executions, which include hangings, beheadings, and other methods of murder, as well as explanations of each crime and the reason for the punishment. An incredible classic, A Hangman’s Diary is more than a history lesson; it shows the true anarchy that inhabited our world only a few hundred years ago. Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade imprint, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in history--books about World War II, the Third Reich, Hitler and his henchmen, the JFK assassination, conspiracies, the American Civil War, the American Revolution, gladiators, Vikings, ancient Rome, medieval times, the old West, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

Download or read book Executioner Pierrepoint written by Albert Pierrepoint and published by Coronet. This book was released on 1998-01-01 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From 1931 until his resignation in 1956, following in the footsteps of his father and uncle, Pierrepoint held the position of Official Executioner. During his career, he carried out over 400 executions and taught his methods to foreign colleagues.

Download or read book Let the Lord Sort Them written by Maurice Chammah and published by Crown. This book was released on 2021-01-26 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • A deeply reported, searingly honest portrait of the death penalty in Texas—and what it tells us about crime and punishment in America “If you’re one of those people who despair that nothing changes, and dream that something can, this is a story of how it does.”—Anand Giridharadas, The New York Times Book Review WINNER OF THE J. ANTHONY LUKAS AWARD In 1972, the United States Supreme Court made a surprising ruling: the country’s death penalty system violated the Constitution. The backlash was swift, especially in Texas, where executions were considered part of the cultural fabric, and a dark history of lynching was masked by gauzy visions of a tough-on-crime frontier. When executions resumed, Texas quickly became the nationwide leader in carrying out the punishment. Then, amid a larger wave of criminal justice reform, came the death penalty’s decline, a trend so durable that even in Texas the punishment appears again close to extinction. In Let the Lord Sort Them, Maurice Chammah charts the rise and fall of capital punishment through the eyes of those it touched. We meet Elsa Alcala, the orphaned daughter of a Mexican American family who found her calling as a prosecutor in the nation’s death penalty capital, before becoming a judge on the state’s highest court. We meet Danalynn Recer, a lawyer who became obsessively devoted to unearthing the life stories of men who committed terrible crimes, and fought for mercy in courtrooms across the state. We meet death row prisoners—many of them once-famous figures like Henry Lee Lucas, Gary Graham, and Karla Faye Tucker—along with their families and the families of their victims. And we meet the executioners, who struggle openly with what society has asked them to do. In tracing these interconnected lives against the rise of mass incarceration in Texas and the country as a whole, Chammah explores what the persistence of the death penalty tells us about forgiveness and retribution, fairness and justice, history and myth. Written with intimacy and grace, Let the Lord Sort Them is the definitive portrait of a particularly American institution.

Download or read book Literary Executions written by John Cyril Barton and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines literary and legal sources to document thoughts and feelings about capital punishment in the United States over the long nineteenth century.Drawing from legal and extralegal discourse but focusing on imaginative literature, Literary Executions examines representations of, responses to, and arguments for and against the death penalty in the United States over the long nineteenth century. John Cyril Barton creates a generative dialogue between artistic relics and legal history. He looks to novels, short stories, poems, and creative nonfiction as well as legislative reports, trial transcripts, legal documents, newspaper and journal articles, treatises, and popular books (like The Record of Crimes, A Defence of Capital Punishment, and The Gallows, the Prison, and the Poor House), all of which were part of the debate over the death penalty.Barton focuses on several canonical figures-James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Lydia Maria Child, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and Theodore Dreiser-and offers new readings of their work in light of the death penalty controversy. Barton also gives close attention to a host of then-popular-but-now-forgotten writers-particularly John Neal, Slidell MacKenzie, William Gilmore Simms, Sylvester Judd, and George Lippard-whose work helped shape or was shaped by the influential anti-gallows movement. Analyzing the tension between sovereignty and social responsibility in a democratic republic, Barton argues that the high stakes of capital punishment dramatize the confrontation between the citizen-subject and sovereign authority in its starkest terms. In bringing together the social and the aesthetic, Barton shows how legal forms informed literary forms and traces the emergence of the modern State in terms of the administration of lawful death.By engaging the politics and poetics of capital punishment, Literary Executions contends that the movement to abolish the death penalty in the United States should be seen as an important part of the context that brought about the flowering of the American Renaissance during the antebellum period and that influenced literature later in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Download or read book A Descending Spiral written by Marc Bookman and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2021-06-15 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Powerful, wry essays offering modern takes on a primitive practice, from one of our most widely read death penalty abolitionists As Ruth Bader Ginsburg has noted, people who are well represented at trial rarely get the death penalty. But as Marc Bookman shows in a dozen brilliant essays, the problems with capital punishment run far deeper than just bad representation. Exploring prosecutorial misconduct, racist judges and jurors, drunken lawyering, and executing the innocent and the mentally ill, these essays demonstrate that precious few people on trial for their lives get the fair trial the Constitution demands. Today, death penalty cases continue to capture the hearts, minds, and eblasts of progressives of all stripes—including the rich and famous (see Kim Kardashian’s advocacy)—but few people with firsthand knowledge of America’s “injustice system” have the literary chops to bring death penalty stories to life. Enter Marc Bookman. With a voice that is both literary and journalistic, the veteran capital defense lawyer and seven-time Best American Essays “notable” author exposes the dark absurdities and fatal inanities that undermine the logic of the death penalty wherever it still exists. In essays that cover seemingly “ordinary” capital cases over the last thirty years, Bookman shows how violent crime brings out our worst human instincts—revenge, fear, retribution, and prejudice. Combining these emotions with the criminal legal system’s weaknesses—purposely ineffective, arbitrary, or widely infected with racism and misogyny—is a recipe for injustice. Bookman has been charming and educating readers in the pages of The Atlantic, Mother Jones, and Slate for years. His wit and wisdom are now collected and preserved in A Descending Spiral.

Download or read book Execution written by Geoffrey Abbott and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2006-04-04 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Execution is a gruesomely fascinating account of methods of judicial Execution from around the world and through the ages, and includes such hair-raising categories as death by cannibalism, being sewn into an animal's belly and a thousand cuts. In his own darkly humorous style, Geoffrey Abbott describes the instruments used and their effectiveness, and reveals the macabre origins of familiar phrases such as 'gone west' or 'drawn a blank', as well as the jargon of the underworld. From the preparation of the victim to the disposal of the body, Execution answers all the questions you are ever likely to ask, and some you would never want to imagine.

Download or read book The Hangman s Tale written by Syd Dernley and published by Trans-Atlantic Publications. This book was released on 1990 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Art of Executing Well written by Nicholas Terpstra and published by Penn State University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume focuses on a feature of executions that was unique to Renaissance Italy: the presence in prisons and on scaffolds of laymen, gathered in confraternities called "conforterie," who worked with prisoners to prepare them spiritually and psychologically for execution. The book includes both primary sources and a series of essays that expand on the theatrical, artistic, theological, musical, and historical contexts of comforting.

Download or read book Demands of the Dead written by Katy Ryan and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2012-04-15 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first work to combine literary criticism with other forms of death penalty–abolitionist writing, Demands of the Dead demonstrates the active importance of literature and literary criticism to the struggle for greater justice in the United States. Gathering personal essays, scholarly articles, and creative writings on the death penalty in American culture, this striking collection brings human voices and literary perspectives to a subject that is often overburdened by statistics and angry polemics. Contributors include death-row prisoners, playwrights, poets, activists, and literary scholars. Highlighting collaborations between writers inside and outside prison, all within the context of the history of state killing laws and foundational concepts that perpetuate a culture of violent death, Demands of the Dead opens with a pamphlet dictated by Willie Francis, a teenager who survived a first execution attempt in Louisiana’s electric chair before he was subsequently killed by the state in 1947. Writers are a conspicuous part of U.S. death-penalty history, composing a vibrant literary record of resistance to state killing. This multigenre collection both recalls and contributes to this tradition through discussions of such writers as Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Gertrude Atherton, Ernest Gaines, Sonia Sanchez, Kia Corthron, and Sherman Alexie. A major contribution to literary studies and American prison studies, Demands of the Dead asserts the relevance of storytelling to ethical questions and matters of public policy. Contributors Sherman Alexie John Cyril Barton Steve Champion Kia Corthron Thomas Dutoit Willie Francis H. Bruce Franklin Tom Kerr David Kieran Jennifer Leigh Lieberman Jill McDonough Anthony Ross Katy Ryan Elizabeth Ann Stein Rick Stetter Matthew Stratton Jason Stupp Delbert Tibbs

Download or read book Death Sentences written by Birte Christ and published by Legenda. This book was released on 2019-04-08 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As Albert Camus once remarked: 'Of capital punishment, people write only [...] in a low voice.' Journalists and state officials alike use a carefully policed language when making any reference to the death penalty: when human beings are to be executed by the state, some key actors talk about what will be done in terms of legalities and procedures. Does fiction provide a counterbalance for that discretion, or simply echo it? What other perspectives can it bring into the foreground, and can literary language express a response to a supposedly necessary horror, or a terrible injustice, which other voices or media cannot? Considering a range of major works from across Western Europe and the United States, from the 18th century until the present day, Death Sentences investigates the contribution of poetics to our understanding, past and present, of capital punishment. The sophisticated literary representations found in Hugo, Dostoevsky, Wilde, Kafka, Mailer, King and others offer a privileged vantage point from which to illuminate and critique a unique institution which itself relies heavily on spectacle and representation to be operative and legitimized. Birte Christ is Assistant Professor of American Literature and Culture at Justus-Liebig-University Giessen. Ève Morisi is Associate Professor of French and Fellow of St Hugh's College at the University of Oxford.

Download or read book The Executioner s Song written by Norman Mailer and published by Grand Central Pub. This book was released on 1980 with total page 1024 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A reconstruction of the crime and fate of Gary Gilmore, the convicted murderer who sought his own execution in Utah where he was imprisoned, is based on taped interviews with relatives, friends, lawyers, and law-enforcement officials

Download or read book Literary Executions written by John Cyril Barton and published by Johns Hopkins University Press+ORM. This book was released on 2014-07-17 with total page 541 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Rich with historical detail . . . examines the figure and theme of the death penalty in imaginative literature from Cooper to Dreiser.” —Gregg Crane, Professor of English Language and Literature, University of Michigan Drawing from legal and extralegal discourse but focusing on imaginative literature, Literary Executions examines representations of, responses to, and arguments for and against the death penalty in the United States over the long nineteenth century. John Cyril Barton creates a generative dialogue between artistic relics and legal history. He looks to novels, short stories, poems, and creative nonfiction as well as legislative reports, trial transcripts, legal documents, newspaper and journal articles, treatises, and popular books (like The Record of Crimes, A Defence of Capital Punishment, and The Gallows, the Prison, and the Poor House), all of which were part of the debate over the death penalty. Barton focuses on several canonical figures—James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Lydia Maria Child, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and Theodore Dreiser—and offers new readings of their work in light of the death penalty controversy. Barton also gives close attention to a host of then-popular-but-now-forgotten writers—particularly John Neal, Slidell MacKenzie, William Gilmore Simms, Sylvester Judd, and George Lippard—whose work helped shape or was shaped by the influential anti-gallows movement. By engaging the politics and poetics of capital punishment, Literary Executions contends that the movement to abolish the death penalty in the United States should be seen as an important part of the context that brought about the flowering of the American Renaissance during the antebellum period and that influenced literature later in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries