"Reporters lover murders", Calvin Trillin writes in the introdution to Killings. "In a pinch, what the lawyers call 'wrongful death' will do, particularly if it's sudden." Killings, first published in 1984 and expanded for this edition, shows Trillin to be such a reporter, drawn time after time to tales of sudden death. These stories, wich originally appeared in The New Yorker between 1969 and 2010, are vivid portraits of lives cut short. An upstanding farmer in Iowa finds himself drastically changed by a woman he meets in a cocktail lounge. An eccentric old man in Eastern Kentucky is enraged by te presence of a documentary filmmaker. Two women move to a bucolic Virginia county to find peace, only to end up at war over a shared road. Stark and compassionate, deeply obseved and beautifully written, Killings is "that rarity reportage as art" (William Geist, The New York Times Book Review).
