Public discussion of euthanasia and assisted suicide is growing. In Australia as elsewhere the debate is difficult, contentious and confronting, and hampered by the secrecy that necessarily surrounds illegal practice. Most people simply have no way of knowing how, and how often, medically assisted death actually occurs. Roger Magnusson presents, for the first time, detailed first-hand accounts by doctors, nurses, therapists and other health professionals who have been participants in assisted death. All have been intimately involved in caring for people with AIDS, both in Australia and in California. He places these ambivalent, self-incriminating accounts within the broader context of the right-to-die debate and the challenges of palliative care. The frankness of the health workers and the richness of their collected evidence set this book apart. From within a culture of deception they speak knowingly and movingly of the merciful release of a peaceful death, while acknowledging the reality of 'botched attempts', euthanasia without consent, precipitative euthanasia, lack of accountability and professional distance, and many other disturbing issues. Angels of Death provides a window into the 'euthanasia underground'-a secret part of medicine and nursing that few professionals will publicly acknowledge. It brings a sense of urgency and precision to public debate, and equips us all to think more independently about these crucial issues.

Victoria's children of the dark

Beneath the Neon: Life and Death in the Tunnels of Las Vegas chronicles O’Brien’s adventures in subterranean Las Vegas. He follows the footsteps of a psycho killer. He braces against a raging flood. He parties with naked crackheads. He learns how to make meth, that art is most beautiful where it’s least expected, that in many ways, he prefers underground Las Vegas to aboveground Las Vegas, and that there are no pots of gold under the neon rainbow.

In her exciting new book, Marisol LeBrón traces the rise of punitive governance in Puerto Rico over the course of the twentieth century and up to the present. Punitive governance emerged as a way for the Puerto Rican state to manage the deep and ongoing crises stemming from the archipelago’s incorporation into the United States as a colonial territory. A structuring component of everyday life for many Puerto Ricans, police power has reinforced social inequality and worsened conditions of vulnerability in marginalized communities. This book provides powerful examples of how Puerto Ricans negotiate and resist their subjection to increased levels of segregation, criminalization, discrimination, and harm. Policing Life and Death shows how Puerto Ricans are actively rejecting punitive solutions and working toward alternative understandings of safety and a more just future.

Simultaneously funny and frightful, Srikanth Reddy's Underworld Lit is a multiverse quest through various cultures' realms of the dead. Couched in a literature professor's daily mishaps with family life and his sudden reckoning with mortality, this adventurous serial prose poem moves from the college classroom to the oncologist's office to the mythic underworlds of Mayan civilization, the ancient Egyptian place of judgment and rebirth, the infernal court of Qing dynasty China, and beyond—testing readers along with the way with diabolically demanding quizzes. It unsettles our sense of home as it ferries us back and forth across cultures, languages, epochs, and the shifting border between the living and the dead.

“I am Moscow’s underground son, the result of one too many nights on the town,” says Mbobo, the precocious twelve-year-old narrator of Hamid Ismailov’s The Underground. Born from a Siberian woman and an African athlete competing in the 1980 Moscow Olympics, Mbobo navigates the complexities of being a fatherless, mixed-raced boy in the Soviet Union in the years before its collapse, guided only by the Moscow subway system. Named one of the "ten best Russian novels of the 21st Century" (Continent Magazine), The Underground is Ismailov’s haunting tour of the Soviet capital, on the surface and beneath. Though deeply engaged with great Russian authors of the past—Dostoyevsky, Nabokov, and, above all, Pushkin—Ismailov is an emerging master of Russian writing that reflects the country’s diversity today. Reviews "Hamid Ismailov has the capacity of Salman Rushdie at his best to show the grotesque realization of history on the ground." —Literary Review "The dream of grandeur is more than justified by the artfulness of The Underground, which...create[s] the motifs of blackness, subterranean movement, and isolation that are the novel’s strongest effects." —Transitions Online Hamid Ismailov is an Uzbek journalist, writer, and translator who was forced to flee Uzbekistan in 1992 for the United Kingdom, where he now works for the BBC World Service. His works are still banned in Uzbekistan. His writing has been published in Uzbek, Russian, French, English, and other languages. He is the author of novels including Sobranie Utonchyonnyh, Le Vagabond Flamboyant, Two Lost to Life, The Railway, The Underground, A Poet and Bin-Laden and The Dead Lake; poetry collections including Sad (Garden) and Pustynya (Desert); and books of visual poetry Post Faustum and Kniga Otsutstvi. Carol Ermakova studied German and Russian language and literature and holds an MA in translation from Bath University. She first visited Russia in 1991. More recently, Ermakova spent two years in Moscow working as a teacher and translator. Carol currently lives in the North Pennines and works as a freelance translator.