When the Civil War halted steamboat travel on the Mississippi River in 1861, an unemployed riverboat pilot named Samuel Clemens enlisted in the Missouri militia. After two weeks of service, Clemens a
In the words of one critic, "a turbulent, never-ending nose-dive into the depths of one man’s paranoia that, to his utter and horrifying dismay, repeatedly comes true."
Gil Brewer is one of the modern masters of desperate noir fiction, and this is the first collection of his short stories, expanded to include five stories left out of the original edition.
In late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century American writing, the "West," which comprised the territory between the Appalachian mountains and the Mississippi River, was a ubiquitous topic. Yet th
When John Rockwell, a Yankee captive at Andersonville, reaches across the prison's "dead line" to pluck a bunch of violets, Confederateguard Jack Foster is supposed to shoot him. Con
