{"product_id":"pitiful-criminals-isbn-9781619023116","title":"Pitiful Criminals","description":"In \u003ci\u003ePitiful Criminals\u003c\/i\u003e, Greg Bottoms offers thirteen genre–bending chapters from his past that take a close look at the lives of small–time criminals driven, often by confusion and desperation, to deeds that range from the absurd to the heinous. We meet the author's schizophrenic arsonist brother, a depressed pot grower, a damaged ex–dealer who barely escaped a violent burglary, a born–again teenage shooter, and other alienated Americans pushed to extremes by psychology and circumstance. Forceful, poetic, unique, and utterly uncompromising, it is an unforgettable tour of the dark side of the human condition.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eGreg Bottoms's innovative fiction and creative nonfiction have focused on the American South, the effects of violence on individual lives, criminal behavior, mental illness, ecstatic and spiritual experience, and class in America. He blends explicitly autobiographical and biographical content with artful storytelling, a cultural journalist's observations, and a philosopher's deep inquiry into the strange ways we live now. This is postmodern crime fiction at its gritty and original best.Praise for \u003ci\u003ePitiful Criminals\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"By turns evocatively understated and rapturously outrageous, \u003ci\u003ePitiful Criminals\u003c\/i\u003e is a collision of memory and fiction that compassionately reminds us what makes us human, what makes us stupid, what makes us genuinely abhorrent, and why we are sometimes still worth loving nevertheless.\"  —John D'Agata, author of \u003ci\u003eAbout a Mountain\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eLifespan of a Fact\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eGreg Bottoms\u003c\/b\u003e is an essayist, story writer, and critic.  He is the author of a memoir, \u003ci\u003eAngelhead: My Brother's Descent into Madness,\u003c\/i\u003e two books of narrative essays about American self–taught religious artists, \u003ci\u003eThe Colorful Apocalypse: Journeys in Outsider Art\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eSpiritual American Trash: Portraits from the Margins of Art and Faith,\u003c\/i\u003e and three genre–blurring collections of autobiographical short prose, \u003ci\u003eSentimental, Heartbroken Rednecks, Fight Scenes,\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eSwallowing the Past.\u003c\/i\u003e  He is a Professor of English at the University of Vermont, where he teaches creative writing.","brand":"Counterpoint","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46300919890149,"sku":"NP9781619023116","price":16.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781619023116.jpg?v=1767734814","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/pitiful-criminals-isbn-9781619023116","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}