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"Fresh Kills quickly expands past itself, blows away its limiting genre boundaries, and becomes a story of real psychological complexity and emotional realism." --Elizabeth Gilbert, bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love

In Fresh Kills, the murder of John Sanders, Sr. on a New York street corner reunites his estranged and abused children, John, Jr. and Julia. While Julia struggles to keep things together on the home front, Junior, unhinged by his father's death, searches for the killer across the bleak, haunted landscape of his Staten Island hometown. Complicating Junior's pursuit are two police detectives: one, a former childhood friend; the other, a veteran cop who might have his own reasons to wish John, Sr. dead. Junior's emotional state crumbles under the pressure coming at him from every side. Bedding his high school sweetheart doesn't exactly simplify the situation. When the opportunity for revenge presents itself, Junior must decide whether he will continue the chain of violence that has nearly destroyed his life, or give in to the possibility of a new beginning. With emotional intensity, crackling dialogue and a heartfelt sense of place and character, Fresh Kills delivers unexpected and profound insights that speak to the soul of its struggling hero, and heralds a breakthrough voice in fiction.

About the Author
Born in Brooklyn and raised on Staten Island, Bill Loehfelm moved to New Orleans in 1997 where he's taught high school and college, managed a pizza joint and an antique shop, and tended bar in the Quarter and the Warehouse District. Bill's fondness for his adopted city is complete: "As long as New Orleans endures here, so too will I."

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John Sandford on Fresh Kills
John Sandford is the author of Phantom Prey, the latest addition to the bestselling Prey series featuring Lucas Davenport. In an exclusive guest review for Amazon.com, Sandford shares his praise for Bill Loehfelm's debut novel Fresh Kills and explains why it has the hallmarks of a great thriller.

Fresh Kills is an interesting hybrid, a well-written, fine-quality literary novel wrapped in the thriller genre. The thriller drive--a noir tone, cheap apartments, leather jackets and pistols kept in handy places--pulls the reader through a search for a killer, and an examination of how an abusive father, even after death, can reach from the past and manipulate the life of a grown son.

John Sanders' father is brutally murdered on a sidewalk on Staten Island; Sanders isn't unhappy to see him go: he has nothing good to say about the old man. But the question of what happened--how this could happen--pulls him into an examination of the murder, of his father's life, the lives of his dysfunctional family and his own life.

Unlike most thrillers, where the question is whether or not--or how--the killer will be caught, in Fresh Kills, the most pressing question is whether the execution of his father will somehow bring redemption to the blighted lives of Sanders and his sister.

Fresk Kills is a fine novel, with well-developed characters and a terrific sense of place and time; it's also, in thriller terms, a great read. --John Sandford

A Conversation with Bill Loehfelm on Fresh Kills

When did you realize you wanted to be a novelist?

I never made a conscious decision to be a novelist. It's just something I always thought I would do. I wrote my first "novel" when I was eleven, a thirty-page handwritten manuscript that I sent to Random House. I picked them because they published Walter Farley's "Black Stallion" series, which I was really into at that age. At least as far as writing a novel, it was never a question of if, it was a matter of when. Naiveté can get you a long way sometimes.

Did you begin by writing mystery, or have you experimented with other genres?

Fresh Kills is my second novel and my first, if you don't count that giant octopus novel, is a mystery as well. I really enjoy reading the genre, and it seems to match my writing style. I've written a number of short stories, but they're all relationship stories, no mysteries. When I was in high school, I wrote Westerns. They were awful rip-offs of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

What about writing mystery appeals to you?

I love the idea of a character pursuing something, especially something that seems to be a lost cause or just out of reach. It's something we all go through, though maybe on a smaller, less dramatic scale. And having that drive inherent in a character makes it easier to come up with a plot. Mystery can deal with some weighty topics: death, loss, justice, revenge, betrayal, sin, redemption. There are endless opportunities for exploring a character. People can get into trouble for complex and sometimes noble reasons. There's no rule that says serious emotional and psychological subject matter is reserved for massive literary tomes. Look at No Country for Old Men or Gone Baby Gone. When you think about it, most every book is a mystery: What's gonna happen next?

Do you have favorite authors who've influenced your writing style?

When I write, I want the efficiency of Hemingway, the lyricism of Fitzgerald, and the humor of Twain. I'll never get there, but that's what I shoot for. Frank Miller, the graphic novelist who wrote Sin City and the Dark Knight Batman series has been a real influence on me. He really knows how to deliver a line, and to write with punch and grace at the same time. Great dark humor. Batman is probably my favorite character in American story-telling. I've been fascinated by the complexities of that character my whole life. I really like Dennis Lehane, James Lee Burke, and John Banville's "Benjamin Black" novels--they're proof-positive of what I said about mysteries above. The Lovely Bones is another great example. I love Alice Sebold's work. She can't write fast enough for me. Roddy Doyle's got serious game, as well. A lot of musicians have influenced me: U2, Springsteen, Warren Zevon, and the Tragically Hip to name a few. The Gin Blossoms' album New Miserable Experience is a hell of a short story collection.

What made you leave New York for New Orleans?

February. Here we get Mardi Gras, there you get slush and sleet. Seriously though, I'd fallen in love with New Orleans while visiting as a tourist. It was like meeting someone you instantly know is on your wavelength. And I wanted an adventure. I didn't want to spend my whole life within ten miles of where I grew up. Something just told me New Orleans was where I needed to be. It was right.

Is there something about New Orleans that's helped you find and develop your voice?

Time. In New Orleans, taking your time with everything, from a career to a relationship to a cup of coffee is a way of life. And no one thinks you're weird for pursuing the arts. It's a very supportive environment. This place encourages you to take chances and do things differently. Most of the people I know are accomplished musicians, writers, painters, photographers, etc. The attitude here gave me time to write and write a lot, plus the cost of living is pretty low. You don't have to live your whole life at work.

Why did you choose to return home (imaginatively speaking) to write Fresh Kills?

For the longest time, I had Junior returning home after moving away, but the story suffered. He had too few relationships, there wasn't enough interaction with other people. Eventually I realized that his not going anywhere geographically paralleled well with his not getting anywhere emotionally. Staten Island is where this story belongs.

Continue reading our Q&A with Bill Loehfelm.
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"A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that grew in the ears themselves, stuck out on either side like turn signals indicating two directions at once. Full, pursed lips protruded beneath the bushy black moustache and, at their corners, sank into little folds filled with disapproval and potato chip crumbs."

Meet Ignatius J. Reilly, the hero of John Kennedy Toole's tragicomic tale, A Confederacy of Dunces. This 30-year-old medievalist lives at home with his mother in New Orleans, pens his magnum opus on Big Chief writing pads he keeps hidden under his bed, and relays to anyone who will listen the traumatic experience he once had on a Greyhound Scenicruiser bound for Baton Rouge. ("Speeding along in that bus was like hurtling into the abyss.") But Ignatius's quiet life of tyrannizing his mother and writing his endless comparative history screeches to a halt when he is almost arrested by the overeager Patrolman Mancuso--who mistakes him for a vagrant--and then involved in a car accident with his tipsy mother behind the wheel. One thing leads to another, and before he knows it, Ignatius is out pounding the pavement in search of a job.

Over the next several hundred pages, our hero stumbles from one adventure to the next. His stint as a hotdog vendor is less than successful, and he soon turns his employers at the Levy Pants Company on their heads. Ignatius's path through the working world is populated by marvelous secondary characters: the stripper Darlene and her talented cockatoo; the septuagenarian secretary Miss Trixie, whose desperate attempts to retire are constantly, comically thwarted; gay blade Dorian Greene; sinister Miss Lee, proprietor of the Night of Joy nightclub; and Myrna Minkoff, the girl Ignatius loves to hate. The many subplots that weave through A Confederacy of Dunces are as complicated as anything you'll find in a Dickens novel, and just as beautifully tied together in the end. But it is Ignatius--selfish, domineering, and deluded, tragic and comic and larger than life--who carries the story. He is a modern-day Quixote beset by giants of the modern age. His fragility cracks the shell of comic bluster, revealing a deep streak of melancholy beneath the antic humor. John Kennedy Toole committed suicide in 1969 and never saw the publication of his novel. Ignatius Reilly is what he left behind, a fitting memorial to a talented and tormented life. --Alix Wilber.
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In the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001, in his fourteenth year as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Alan Greenspan took part in a very quiet collective effort to ensure that America didn't experience an economic meltdown, taking the rest of the world with it. There was good reason to fear the worst: the stock market crash of October 1987, his first major crisis as Federal Reserve Chairman, coming just weeks after he assumed control, had come much closer than is even today generally known to freezing the financial system and triggering a genuine financial panic. But the most remarkable thing that happened to the economy after 9/11 was...nothing. What in an earlier day would have meant a crippling shock to the system was absorbed astonishingly quickly.

After 9/11 Alan Greenspan knew, if he needed any further reinforcement, that we're living in a new world - the world of a global capitalist economy that is vastly more flexible, resilient, open, self-directing, and fast-changing than it was even 20 years ago. It's a world that presents us with enormous new possibilities but also enormous new challenges. The Age of Turbulence is Alan Greenspan's incomparable reckoning with the nature of this new world - how we got here, what we're living through, and what lies over the horizon, for good and for ill-channeled through his own experiences working in the command room of the global economy for longer and with greater effect than any other single living figure. He begins his account on that September 11th morning, but then leaps back to his childhood, and follows the arc of his remarkable life's journey through to his more than 18-year tenure as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, from 1987 to 2006, during a time of transforming change.

Alan Greenspan shares the story of his life first simply with an eye toward doing justice to the extraordinary amount of history he has experienced and shaped. But his other goal is to draw readers along the same learning curve he followed, so they accrue a grasp of his own understanding of the underlying dynamics that drive world events. In the second half of the book, having brought us to the present and armed us with the conceptual tools to follow him forward, Dr. Greenspan embarks on a magnificent tour de horizon of the global economy. He reveals the universals of economic growth, delves into the specific facts on the ground in each of the major countries and regions of the world, and explains what the trend-lines of globalization are from here. The distillation of a life's worth of wisdom and insight into an elegant expression of a coherent worldview, The Age of Turbulence will stand as Alan Greenspan's personal and intellectual legacy.

A Timeline of a Remarkable Career Mar. 6, 1926 Born in New York City 1936 At 10 sees Roosevelt campaigning; becomes expert on the 1936 Yankees 1938 Takes up clarinet at 12 1943-44 Studies clarinet at Julliard Mid 1944 Joins Henry Jerome Band 1948 Graduates (summa cum laude) from New York University. (He later earns a master's in 1950 and a Ph.D. in 1977, also from NYU.) Hired as economic analyst at the Conference Board. 1954-74 Co-founds Townsend-Greenspan & Co. Inc., an economic consulting firm in New York City. (He returns in 1977.) 1974 Nominated by President Ford as chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisors. 1983 Chair of bipartisan National Commission on Social Security Reform. June 1, 1987 Nominated by President Reagan for Fed Chair. Confirmed by Senate August 3. Oct. 19, 1987 Only 69 days into Greenspan's term, the Dow drops 508 points and 22%. July 10, 1991 Nominated by President George H.W. Bush to a second term as Fed Chairman. Later nominated to a third (February 22, 1996) and fourth term (January 4, 2000) by President Clinton. Apr. 6, 1997 Marries Andrea Mitchell May 18, 2004 Nominated by President George W. Bush for a fifth term as Fed chairman Jan. 31, 2006 Completes 18 ½ years at the Fed Feb. 1, 2006 Forms Greenspan Associates LLC, an economic consulting firm

Alan Greenspan's Top 10 Classical and Jazz Favorites Before Alan Greenspan embarked on his legendary financial career, he studied the clarinet at Julliard and played as a professional jazz musician (while doing tax returns for his bandmates). He chose 10 favorites for us from a lifetime of listening, including: Mozart, Piano Concerto No. 23 Vivaldi, Complete Cello Concertos Coleman Hawkins, "Body and Soul"

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Julia Reed went to New Orleans in 1991 to cover the reelection of former (and currently incarcerated) governor Edwin Edwards Seduced by the city's sauntering pace, its rich flavors and exotic atmosphere, she was never entirely able to leave again. After almost fifteen years of living like a vagabond on her reporter's schedule, she got married and bought a house in the historic Garden District. Four weeks after she moved in, Hurricane Katrina struck.

With her house as the center of her own personal storm as well as the ever-evolving stage set for her new life as an upstanding citizen, Reed traces the fates of all who enter to wine, dine (at her table for twenty-four), tear down walls, install fixtures, throw fits and generally leave their mark on the house on First Street. There's Antoine, Reed's beloved homeless handyman with an unfortunate habit of landing in jail; JoAnn Clevenger, the Auntie Mame—like restaurateur who got her start mixing drinks for Dizzy Gillespie and selling flowers from a cart; Eddie, the supremely laid-back contractor with Hollywood ambitions; and, with the arrival of Katrina, the boys from the Oklahoma National Guard, fleets of door-kicking animal rescuers and the self-appointed (and occasionally naked) neighborhood watchman. Finally, there's the literally clueless detective who investigates the robbery in which the first draft of this book was stolen. Through it all, Reed discovers there really is no place like home.

Rich with sumptuous details and with the author's trademark humor well in the fore, The House on First Street is the chronicle of a remarkable and often hilarious homecoming, as well as a thoroughly original tribute to our country's most original city.

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The Pulitzer Prize and Drama Critics Circle Award winning play—reissued with an introduction by Arthur Miller (Death of a Salesman and The Crucible), and Williams' essay "The World I Live In."

It is a very short list of 20th-century American plays that continue to have the same power and impact as when they first appeared—57 years after its Broadway premiere, Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire is one of those plays. The story famously recounts how the faded and promiscuous Blanche DuBois is pushed over the edge by her sexy and brutal brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski. Streetcar launched the careers of Marlon Brando, Jessica Tandy, Kim Hunter and Karl Malden, and solidified the position of Tennessee Williams as one of the most important young playwrights of his generation, as well as that of Elia Kazan as the greatest American stage director of the '40s and '50s.

Who better than America's elder statesman of the theater, Williams' contemporary Arthur Miller, to write as a witness to the lightning that struck American culture in the form of A Streetcar Named Desire? Miller's rich perspective on Williams' singular style of poetic dialogue, sensitive characters, and dramatic violence makes this a unique and valuable new edition of A Streetcar Named Desire. This definitive new edition will also include Williams' essay "The World I Live In," and a brief chronology of the author's life..
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This elegantly written account of a young man's search for signs of purpose in the universe is one of the great existential texts of the postwar era and is really funny besides. Binx Bolling, inveterate cinemaphile, contemplative rake and man of the periphery, tries hedonism and tries doing the right thing, but ultimately finds redemption (or at least the prospect of it) by taking a leap of faith and quite literally embracing what only seems irrational..
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A favorite among law students and professors alike, the Examples & Explanations series is ideal for studying, reviewing and testing your understanding through application of hypothetical examples. Authored by leading professors with extensive classroom experience, Examples & Explanations titles offer hypothetical questions in the subject area, complemented by detailed explanations that allow you to test your knowledge of the topic, and compare your own analysis..
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Soul by Soul tells the story of slavery in antebellum America by moving away from the cotton plantations and into the slave market itself, the heart of the domestic slave trade. Taking us inside the New Orleans slave market, the largest in the nation, where 100,000 men, women, and children were packaged, priced, and sold, Walter Johnson transforms the statistics of this chilling trade into the human drama of traders, buyers, and slaves, negotiating sales that would alter the life of each. What emerges is not only the brutal economics of trading but the vast and surprising interdependencies among the actors involved.

Using recently discovered court records, slaveholders' letters, nineteenth-century narratives of former slaves, and the financial documentation of the trade itself, Johnson reveals the tenuous shifts of power that occurred in the market's slave coffles and showrooms. Traders packaged their slaves by "feeding them up," dressing them well, and oiling their bodies, but they ultimately relied on the slaves to play their part as valuable commodities. Slave buyers stripped the slaves and questioned their pasts, seeking more honest answers than they could get from the traders. In turn, these examinations provided information that the slaves could utilize, sometimes even shaping a sale to their own advantage.

Johnson depicts the subtle interrelation of capitalism, paternalism, class consciousness, racism, and resistance in the slave market, to help us understand the centrality of the "peculiar institution" in the lives of slaves and slaveholders alike. His pioneering history is in no small measure the story of antebellum slavery.

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Dead in Attic is a collection of stories by Times-Picayune columnist Chris Rose, recounting the first harrowing year and a half of life in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Celebrated as a local treasure and heaped with national praise, Rose provides a rollercoaster ride of observation, commentary, emotion, tragedy, and even humor -- in a way that only he could find in a devastated wasteland.

They are stories of the dead and the living, stories of survivors and believers, stories of hope and despair. And stories about refrigerators.

Dead in Attic freeze-frames New Orleans, caught between an old era and a new, during its most desperate time, as it struggles out of the floodwaters and wills itself back to life..
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