Now a major TV series from JJ Abrams and Stephen King, starring James Franco (Hulu US, Fox UK and Europe, Stan Australia, SKY New Zealand).
WHAT IF you could go back in time and change the course of history? WHAT IF the watershed moment you could change was the JFK assassination? 11.22.63, the date that Kennedy was shot - unless . . .
King takes his protagonist Jake Epping, a high school English teacher from Lisbon Falls, Maine, 2011, on a fascinating journey back to 1958 - from a world of mobile phones and iPods to a new world of…
I’ve been a fan of Fernando A. Flores for a while, since—from off a table at a bookstore and based entirely on the title—I picked up a copy of his Death to the Bullshit Artists of South Texas, because how could I not? Yet somehow, I missed when his latest book, Valleyesque, came out in 2022. Hence why these stories about a bee wrangler who loses his mother, violence in a border town not too close to the border, and Lee Harvey Oswald’s band are in a list of my favorites reads in 2024.
Each story in Valleyesque offers up a world so vividly rendered I put down the book feeling I’d physically been to each one of them—notwithstanding that these worlds include feathered angels, wax babies, Chopin in a luchador mask, and a Greek chorus of City Girls in the Chulas Fronteras Ropa Usada. As a character in one…
No one captures the border-its history and imagination, its danger, contradiction, and redemption-like Fernando A. Flores, whose stories reimagine and reinterpret the region's existence with peerless style. In his immersive, uncanny borderland, things are never what they seem: a world where the sun is both rising and setting, and where conniving possums efficiently take over an entire town and rewrite its history.
The stories in Valleyesque dance between the fantastical and the hyperreal with dexterous, often hilarious flair. A dying Frederic Chopin stumbles through Ciudad Juarez in the aftermath of his mother's death, attempting to recover his beloved piano that…
Chicago-born and now living in Spain, I was a community organizer in South America and the US before earning a PhD in sociology and becoming a college professor and author. I’ve written five nonfiction books and articles for publications including The New York Times, The Nation, Counterpunch, etc. Of my collection of short stories,Welcome to My Contri, theNY Times Book Reviewsaid that it “leaves us aware that we are in the presence of a formidable new writer.” In Rabble! I’ve called on my organizing experience as well as analysis and fiction to bring to life the actors in the first worker-run, self-governing society in the modern world.
Librais a chillingly realistic novel that re-imagines the assassination of John F. Kennedy. What particularly delighted me was the very realistic-sounding dialogue of the very dissimilar actors in the rambling, uncoordinated but ultimately successful conspiracy, including right-wing Aryan-nation types, non-ideological drifters desperate to leave a mark on history, and (in this version) mobsters and Cuban exile terrorists who blamed Kennedy for the "loss" of Cuba. DeLillo’s renderings of Jack Ruby’s mobster lingo, the uptight tersely coded grunts of the CIA men, the incoherencies of revolutionary wannabe Lee Harvey Oswald and others, are a model of dialogue for any fiction writer.
A reconstruction of the events leading up to John Kennedy's assassination. The antihero of the book is, of course, Lee Harvey Oswald, who is as hauntingly real in this novel as he was elusive to us in real life.
This book is simply phenomenal. I've always been a big fan of Mailer and I'm fascinated by JFK and that era of U.S. politics; the Cold War, espionage, conspiracy theories. Obviously there is an enormous cultural output about Kennedy and the Long Sixties, but this is unique. Mailer paints an entirely convincing canvas about Oswald and his bizarre and short life. Although supremely detailed and well researched, the book also has a kind of dreamlike quality, such is the weirdness and intensity of the tragic story it tells. Oswald's characterization is truly stranger than fiction - he has a distorted intelligence and drive, a deluded and impulsive personality, lashing out at what he perceives to be the weaknesses and limitations of others and of himself. I particularly appreciated how Mailer refuses to throw more fuel onto the conspiracy fire. Instead, he leaves any interpretations about the Kennedy murder up to…
This work looks at the life of harvey Lee Oswald. In 1959 he defected to the Soviet Union and was sent to Minsk, where he was kept under constant KGB surveillance on the suspicion that he might be a CIA agent. In 1993 Norman Mailer spent six months in Minsk retracing Oswald's two and a half years in the USSR, interviewing Oswald's former friends and sweethearts. He obtained exclusive interviews with KGB officers and access to KGB surveillance reports. Mailer also provides an account of Oswald's disastrous childhood and of the events leading from his return to the US in…
One of the reasons I enjoy writing historical novels is because I’ve always loved history. I enjoy creating characters and settings based on real-life incidents. I’m also involved in genealogy and find that kind of history fascinating. Reading about incidents (or like Dragnet’s Joe Friday used to say, "Just the facts, ma’am,") can be dry and boring. When a reader can experience history through fictional characters, history becomes more immersive than the dry accounts of a historical event. It’s entertaining to be able to take oneself back in time to a world with few modern conveniences and fewer distractions of media. While the reader is entertained, they can also learn about history in the process.
While not technically a ‘romance,’ this is the remarkable story of one woman’s quest to uncover her past. In 1963, 25-year-old journalist Christine Lenoir watches in horror as Lee Harvey Oswald is shot live on TV. She has flashbacks and vivid dreams about her life as a young child. Raised by religious sisters in a convent in France, Christine is led to believe that her parents died of the flu. In actuality, she discovers that they and most of the residents of her hometown were slaughtered by the Nazis in June of 1944. It’s a difficult read, but this is an extraordinary book.
Christine Lenoir's early childhood memories are vague. Told that her family perished of influenza, she grows up in the aftermath of World War II believing herself fortunate that her parents at least did not die violently, as so many did, and because she found a good and loving home. But she witnesses the live telecast of Lee Harvey Oswald's murder, strange dreams and terrifying images begin to plague her. As her faint recollections of the horrors of her childhood become stronger, Christine embarks on a quest to discover what her visions mean. She ultimately unearths a history she never knew…
At 1:00 p.m. on November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was pronounced dead, the victim of a sniper attack during his motorcade through Dallas. That may be the only fact generally agreed upon in the vast literature spawned by the assassination. National polls reveal that an overwhelming majority of Americans (75%) believe that there was a high-level conspiracy behind Lee Harvey Oswald. Many even believe that Oswald was entirely innocent. In this continuously absorbing, powerful, ground-breaking book, Vincent Bugliosi shows how we have come to believe such lies about an event that changed the course of history.
As a writer, I have sworn to read all over the place and try to get out of
my comfort zone as much as possible. I also believe that great stories lie in
waiting in many places in many forms. (The Last of Us, a video game, was
the source material for one of the best HBO series last year.) For a long while
I thought I should probably explore the banquet of great work being done in
comics and graphic novels.
(Writers note: If you want to learn a lot about
plotting and economical storytelling, Frank Miller's Batman comics are a
great place to start.)
I was so lucky to have picked up The Department
of Truth from the line at the register at Forbidden Planet here in New York
City. It is a fever dream of conspiracy madness that slowly unwinds what we
believe is the…
COLE TURNER has studied conspiracy theories all his life, but he isn't prepared for what happens when he discovers that all of them are true: the JFK Assassination, Flat Earth Theory, Bigfoot, Mothman, and so much worse. One organization has been covering them up for generations, controlling the narrative for what they claim is the greater good.
What is the deep, dark secret behind the Department of Truth-and will learning it destroy Cole's life from the inside out?
The first three arcs of the critically acclaimed series by Eisner Award-winning writer JAMES TYNION IV (Something is Killing the Children, The…
I was in the fourth grade when JFK was assassinated. I grew up in the late 1960s as conspiracy theories about ‘who killed Kennedy’ flourished. Jack Ruby’s murder of Oswald made me suspect the mafia played a role. After Oliver Stone’s controversial 1991 JFK film, I convinced a publisher to allow me to reexamine the assassination. I did not expect to solve the case. Halfway through my research, however, I realized there was an answer to ‘who killed Kennedy.’ It was not what I had expected. I discovered that the story of how a 24-year-old sociopath armed with a $12 rifle managed to kill the president was a far more fascinating one than I could have ever envisioned.
Award-winning novelist Thomas Mallon explores the serendipitous world of Ruth Paine, the Quaker who befriended Lee and Marina Oswald in the fateful months leading up to the assassination. In this fast-paced nonfition read, Mallon takes the reader through the tumultuous nine months before the assassination and then along for the often-bizarre years following in which Paine’s largesse is interpreted and twisted by conspiracy theorists to somehow accuse her of being in the middle of a giant plot against Kennedy.
Nearly forty years have passed since Ruth Hyde Paine, a Quaker housewife in suburban Dallas, offered shelter and assistance to a young man named Lee Harvey Oswald and his Russian wife, Marina. For nine months in 1963, Mrs. Paine was so deeply involved in the Oswalds’ lives that she eventually became one of the Warren Commission’s most important witnesses.
Mrs. Paine’s Garage is the tragic story of a well-intentioned woman who found Oswald the job that put him six floors above Dealey Plaza—into which, on November 22, he fired a rifle he’d kept hidden inside Mrs. Paine’s house. But this…
I was in the fourth grade when JFK was assassinated. I grew up in the late 1960s as conspiracy theories about ‘who killed Kennedy’ flourished. Jack Ruby’s murder of Oswald made me suspect the mafia played a role. After Oliver Stone’s controversial 1991 JFK film, I convinced a publisher to allow me to reexamine the assassination. I did not expect to solve the case. Halfway through my research, however, I realized there was an answer to ‘who killed Kennedy.’ It was not what I had expected. I discovered that the story of how a 24-year-old sociopath armed with a $12 rifle managed to kill the president was a far more fascinating one than I could have ever envisioned.
Author Priscilla McMillan was at the crossroads of history. She worked as a junior aide for Senator John Kennedy before she went to Moscow as a reporter during the height of the Cold War. There, in 1959, she interviewed an American marine who had recently defected to the Soviet Union. He was Lee Harvey Oswald. After JFK was killed in 1963, McMillan befriended Oswald’s widow, Marina, and spent hundreds of hours interviewing her. The result of McMillan’s unprecedented direct access to the Oswalds is an unmatched personal study of a troubled young man who turned into one of history’s most notorious assassins.
“The single best book ever written on the Kennedy assassination” -- Thomas Mallon, author of Mrs. Paine's Garage: And the Murder of John F. Kennedy
“It is not at all easy to describe the power of Marina and Lee . . . It is far better than any other book about Kennedy . . . Other books about the Kennedy assassination are all smoke and no fire. Marina and Lee burns.” —New York Times Book Review
Marina and Lee is an indispensable account of one of America’s most traumatic events and a classic work of narrative history. In her meticulous—at…
