Free man: Michael Hash out on bond
Less than a month after a federal judge tossed the capital murder conviction of Michael Wayne Hash, who served a dozen years in prison for a crime it now seems he didn't commit, a judge in Culpeper Circuit Court took less than five minutes to decide Hash should go home.
March 22nd, 2012 issue #1112
Fiction Issue
Winner: Hands by John Davidson
“I remember the first time I laughed in America. It was right after I whipped a fastball at Big White Bastard’s face.
Every boy in the inner city Trenton YMCA baseball program was allowed to pitch at least one inning before the season was over. The fourth inning of our sixth game was my turn. It came after three innings of Big White Bastard’s hollering “gook” at me, the little Vietnamese kid in the outfield. Every time I touched the ball, out came various versions of gook jokes plus the occasional, slightly off-target comment about “Chinks.” The other idiots in his dugout cackled each time he did it. No one on my team gave a damn…”
John Davidson took second place in the 2010 short story contest with "First Church," which contest judge and mega-author John Grisham lauded as "haunting and frightening."
Fiction winners: Lawyers dominate in Grisham's short-story picks
In Hollywood, everybody has a screenplay. In Charlottesville, apparently everybody has a short story, at least judging by the 141 people who entered the Hook's 11th fiction contest— nearly double the number of those who participated just three years ago. We're still trying to analyze whether this is a trend, but the Hook's short-story judge, John Grisham, a former lawyer-turned-writer, picked lawyers-turned-short-story-writers as two of the three winners of this year's contest. Yet none of the winning stories had courtroom scenes.
Nell Casey: Swimming through Spalding Gray
Around 2007, Kathleen Russo, widow of monologuist Spalding Gray, approached author Nell Casey about writing Gray’s autobiography. Gray, who committed suicide in 2004, spent his career publicly, nakedly chronicling his life in monologues like Swimming to Cambodia. Casey asked herself: Had Gray already said everything onstage? The answer: a resounding no. The journals showed her that there much more than the man's famous monologues. “It wasn't possible for Gray to chronicle or confess all aspects of his life publicly," says Casey, "but privately he did so.”
The Death Look: Donna Britt rages for a reason
Former Washington Post columnist Donna Britt has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. So why, in her household with three healthy sons and a husband, is such an acclaimed writer the one walking the dog, doing the laundry, and emptying dirty dishes from the sink? And why does her reaction manifest itself in what she calls The Death Look?
Weird sisters: When Shakespeare plays second fiddle
Best-selling author Eleanor Brown is a book festival’s ideal guest: a voracious reader from a family of voracious readers who writes about voracious readers. Brown’s first novel, The Weird Sisters, follows a Shakespeare scholar’s three daughters as they return to their Ohio hometown when their mother is stricken with cancer. Though Brown’s book has a cast of bibliophiles and is peppered with Shakespearean references, literature was mainly a springboard for the true heart of the book: the shifting relationship of the titular sisters and their parents, she says.
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Essays
Holy wars: Then, now, and Iran
By Tony Perrino. Warfare is as old as humanity. Since the beginning of civilization, people have fought one another, justifying their aggression as a matter of surv...
Real Estate - On the Block
