An explosive and timely topic Leon Whiteson is a bestselling author who co-authored the book A Place Called Waco, published by the Perseus Group in the Fall of 1999. A Terrible Beauty: An Exploration of the Positive Role of Violence in Life, Culture and Society explores various aspects of violence from historical, cultural, literary and personal perspectives. In this book Whiteson argues that what sex was to the nineteenth century, violence is to the 20th century- a fact of existence but banished to a netherworld: For us, violence is a kind of pornography, a vice roundly condemned and slyly...

In Out of Hand the narrator is the severed right hand of a gifted artist imprisoned in a bottle of formaldehyde and is tormented by his immobilized imagination. While he despises the mundane man to who he was attached, he bitterlyenvies his freedom.In Didn't I Always Know the voice is that of a middle-aged woman sliding into chaos and madness knowing that her freedom of imagination is a ruinous burden.In Deathman, the speaker is a young architect who comes to face to face with an ancient master of death and struggles against the terrible duty that is laid upon him against his will..These...