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True Tales of Crime, Murder, Deceit, and Obsession
A brilliant anthology of modern true-crime writing that illustrates the appeal of this powerful and popular genre, edited and curated by Sarah Weinman, the award-winning author of The Real Lolita.
The appeal of true-crime stories has never been higher. With podcasts like My Favorite Murder and In the Dark, bestsellers like I'll Be Gone in the Dark and Furious Hours, and TV hits like American Crime Story and Wild Wild Country, the cultural appetite for stories of real people doing terrible things is insatiable.
Acclaimed author of The Real Lolita and editor of Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s & 50s (Library of America) and Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives (Penguin), Sarah Weinman brings together an exemplary collection of recent true crime tales. She culls together some of the most refreshing and exciting contemporary journalists and chroniclers of crime working today. Michelle Dean's "Dee Dee Wanted Her Daughter To Be Sick" went viral when it first published and is the basis for the TV show The Act and Pamela Colloff's "The Reckoning," is the gold standard for forensic journalism.
here are 13 pieces in all and as a collection, they showcase writing about true crime across the broadest possible spectrum, while also reflecting what makes crime stories so transfixing and irresistible to the modern reader.
"[A] thoughtful and wide-ranging true crime anthology...The superior quality of these essays begs for future volumes." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Each piece is gripping and demands attention and introspection. This enthralling volume insists that there can and should be humanity within true crime. Whether readers are spellbound or disgusted by the genre, this is a must." - Library Journal (starred review)
"[P]erceptive...A well-chosen sampling of writings from a rapidly expanding and developing field." - Kirkus Reviews
"Essential reading for all true crime fans." - Booklist
This information about Unspeakable Acts was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Nina Subin
Sarah Weinman is the author of The Real Lolita: A Lost Girl, an Unthinkable Crime, and a Scandalous Masterpiece, and the editor, most recently, of Unspeakable Acts: True Tales of Crime, Murder, Deceit & Obsession. She is a 2020 National Magazine Award finalist for reporting and a Calderwood Journalism Fellow at MacDowell, and her work has appeared most recently in New York magazine, the Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair, and the Washington Post. Weinman writes the crime column for the New York Times Book Review and lives in New York City.
If you liked Unspeakable Acts, try these:
The End of the World Is a Cul de Sac
by Louise Kennedy
Published 2024
Brilliant, dark stories of women's lives by "a very major talent" (Joseph O'Connor, Irish Times)
by Sarah Weinman
Published 2023
From the author of The Real Lolita and editor of Unspeakable Acts, the astonishing story of a murderer who conned the people around him - including conservative thinker William F. Buckley - into helping set him free
by T Greenwood
Published 2018
Based on the experiences of real-life kidnapping victim Sally Horner and her captor, whose story shocked the nation and inspired Vladimir Nabokov to write his controversial and iconic Lolita.
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