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Talonbooks is a small, independent, Canadian book publishing company. We have been publishing works of the highest literary merit since the 1960s. With more than 500 books in print, we offer drama, poetry, fiction, and non-fiction by local playwrights, poets, and authors from the mainstream and margins of Canada’s three founding nations, as well as both visible and invisible minorities within Canada’s cultural mosaic. Learn more about us or about the author, Deni Ellis Béchard.
MY FAVOURITE CRIME
Essays & Journalismfrom Around the World
with photos by the author
DENI ELLIS BÉCHARD
Talonbooks
Contents
1 Cover
4 Part I: Essays on Crime and Family Mon Ami, Vice My Favourite Crime The Good People and Me Born on the Fourth of July Disobedient Ancestors
5 Part II: Long-form Journalism Acts of Devotion Born Identity: One Soldier’s Story of Transition “On va tuer les démons”: Fear, Faith, and the Hunt for Child Sorcerers in the Congo Female Vigilantes and Women’s Coalitions in India
6 Part III: Dispatches from Afghanistan Before the Blast: Expats and Self-Fashioning on Social Media Off the Record: Telling Fact from Fiction in a Warzone Rocket Attack in a Kabul Traffic Jam Taimani Alley, Kabul The Faces of the Afghan National Army Women Between the Old and New Afghanistan Biking Toward Freedom with the Afghan Women’s National Cycling Team
7 Part IV: Other Dispatches The Radical Street Art of Havana’s Youth Words of Exile Seeking Peace in Medellín’s House of Memory The Kurdish View of the 2008 American Presidential Elections “Forgotten Gorilla” Sanctuary at Risk Viral Conservation: Lessons from the Kokolopori Bonobo Reserve Ethnic Tension in Québec If Lance Armstrong Were a Literary Genius Trump and the Comedy of Sexual Assault “The Police Told Me My Art Was Ugly, That It Was Trash”: Havana’s Street Artists Adapt to a Rise in Censorship
8 Part V: Essays on Writing Van of Love (or Writing Everywhere) My First Plagiarism Learning to Rage (“Why I Write” Revisited)
11 Copyright
Page List
1 Cover
2 iii
3 vii
4 viii
5 1
6 3
7 4
8 5
9 6
10 7
11 8
12 9