In international bestselling author Campbell Armstrong’s tense, sophisticated thriller, an art project gone wrong draws a painter into the world of a serial killer All around himself, Harrison sees New York City sinking into chaos. Graffiti, robbery, murder, and rape fill the news—crimes committed by desperate people who saw no other option than to hurt someone. As a human being, Harrison is sickened by it. As an artist, he sees an opportunity. After years of getting no recognition for his painting, Harrison is about to quit making art when he has the idea for the Mr. Apology hotline. He posts handbills asking criminals to call in and confess their crimes—anonymously, of course—so he can turn their guilt into his art. But what starts as a clever idea soon takes a deadly turn. When a man calls in to say he’s planning on killing someone, Harrison isn’t sure whether to believe it. But when a killing spree grips the city, this starving artist has no doubt that the final target will be Mr. Apology himself.

Literature has often understood the problematic nature of confession better than the law, as Brooks demonstrates in perceptive readings of legal cases set against works by Roussean, Dostoevsky, Joyce, and Camus, among others."--BOOK JACKET.

A collection of essays, originally published in "The New Yorker," "Esquire," and other periodicals, includes the title piece about a New York artist who invites people to call and leave an apology on his answering machine.

Mr. West covers the main events in superstar Kanye West's life while also following the poet on her year spent researching, writing, and pregnant. The book explores how we are drawn to celebrities—to their portrayal in the media—and how we sometimes find great private meaning in another person's public story, even across lines of gender and race. Blake's aesthetics take her work from prose poems to lineated free verse to tightly wound lyrics to improbably successful sestinas. The poems fully engage pop culture as a strange, complicated presence that is revealing of America itself. This is a daring debut collection and a groundbreaking work. An online reader's companion will be available at http://sarahblake.site.wesleyan.edu.

This book is a genealogical study of confession. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault as well as the history of Western confessional writings from Ancient Greece to contemporary pop culture, this book challenges the transhistorical and commonsense views of confession as an innate impulse resulting in the psychological liberation of the confessing subject. On the contrary, confessional desire is argued to be contingent and constraining, and alternatives to confessional subjectivity are explored.

In this series of hilarious confessions by "New Jersey's answer to Nick Hornby," learn how apologizing and coming to terms with past embarrassments can lead to compassion and maturity (Jonathan Mahler). Dave Bry is sorry. Very sorry. He's sorry to Wendy Metzger for singing the last verse of "Stairway to Heaven" into her ear while slow dancing in junior high school. He's sorry to Judy and Michael Gailhouse for letting their children watch The Amityville Horror when he babysat them. And he's sorry--especially, truly--that he didn't hear his cancer-ridden father call out for help one fateful afternoon. Things are different now. Dave's become a dad, too, and he's discovered a new compassion for the complicated man who raised him. And maybe if his 17-year-old self could meet his current self, he'd think twice before throwing beer cans on Jon Bon Jovi's lawn. Dave's apologies are at turns hysterically funny and profoundly moving, ultimately adding up to a deeply human, poignant and likable portrait of a man trying to come to grips with his past.