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When Women Kill: Four Crimes Retold

When Women Kill: Four Crimes Retold

by Alia Trabucco Zerán, tr. Sophie Hughes

Coffee House Press ·2022 ·248 pages ·True Crime
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56/99
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56/99

Critics

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55/99

Readers

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Scholars

96/99

Rating

15/99

Volume

41/99

Rating

69/99

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About This Book

A genre-bending feminist account of the lives and crimes of four women who committed the double transgression of murder, violating not only criminal law but also the invisible laws of gender. When Women Kill: Four Crimes Retold analyzes four homicides carried out by Chilean women over the course of the twentieth century. Drawing on her training as a lawyer, Alia Trabucco Zerán offers a nuanced close reading of their lives and crimes, foregoing sensationalism in favor of dissecting how all four were both perpetrators of grievous violent acts and victims of another, more insidious kind of violence. This radical retelling challenges the archetype of the woman murderer and reveals another narrative, one as disturbing and provocative as the transgressions themselves: What makes women lash out against the restraints of gendered domesticity, and how do we—readers, viewers, the media, the art world, the political establishment—treat them once they do? Expertly intertwining true crime, critical essay, and research diary, International Booker Prize finalist Alia Trabucco Zerán (The Remainder), in a translation by Sophie Hughes (Hurricane Season), brings an overdue feminist perspective to the study of deviant women.


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Reviews

"Instead, it applies a thoughtful feminist lens to stories as painful as they are gory ..."

Lily Meyer· NPR Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

"In that sense, it is really a book about the power of the imagination."

Megan Bradbury· Times Literary Supplement Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

"Rather than further sensationalizing these crimes, the author uses these women's action—and, perhaps more importantly, the public reaction to their stories—to reflect on society's shifting attitudes about gender, anger, violence, and the law ..."

Kirkus Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

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