"I can't wait for you to read this. I hope it thrills and confounds and inspires you just like it did me." —Greg Kwedar, co-writer, director, and producer of Sing Sing

At Sing Sing, the infamous, Gothic maximum-security prison on the Hudson River in New York, some of the incarcerated pass their time and slay inner demons performing theater—in this case, a silly slapstick comedy about pirates, gladiators, and mummies on a wacky journey through time. An article about this very special theater, written by veteran literary journalist John H. Richardson, is now a major motion picture starring Colman Domingo.

In this collection of magazine stories from Esquire and New York, Richardson showcases seven of his most bizarre and eye-opening journeys into the American scene and psyche. Along with the story that became the movie Sing Sing, read about:

"The Search for Isabella V," is a mystery wrapped in an enigma, involving a fugitive heiress, lots of money, one very real gun, and layer upon layer of internet intimacy and digital deception. In "I Should Have Been There to Protect Him," we meet Michael Brown Sr., whose son was gunned down by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri and left to bleed in the street.

In "The Abortion Ministry of Dr. Willie Parker," an abortion doctor, raised Christian in the South, tries to bring services to women who need it; and in "Ballad of the Sad Climatologists" we meet men and women whose lives are filled with the grim facts of climate change day after day, making a good night's sleep hard to come by. "Children of Ted," brings us face to face with the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski. In the decades since his last deadly act of ecoterrorism, he has become an unlikely prophet to a whole new generation of young acolytes. Finally, we hear from the author himself as he tells the story of his father, a high-ranking CIA spy.

Writes magazine historian Alex Belth: "Richardson has the detached, nonjudgmental, observational eye of the perpetual outsider. He's curious and smart, a realist with a spiky, mordant sense of humor; a truth-seeker, whether writing about abortion clinic doctors, gun advocates, or faded B-movie stars. Richardson loves characters on the fringe." And so will you.

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