Killings

True stories of sudden death in the classic collection by a master of American journalism
"Reporters love murders," Calvin Trillin writes in the introduction 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. But Trillin is attracted less by violence or police procedure than by the way the fabric of people's lives is suddenly exposed when someone comes to an untimely end. As Trillin says, Killings is "more about how Americans live than about how some of them die."
These stories, which 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 woman he meets in a cocktail lounge. An eccentric old man in Eastern Kentucky is...