Former FBI agent Jim Fisher upends the genteel racket of fee-based literary agents and vanity publishers in this searing look at the rise and fall of one bogus entrepreneur who systematically swindled thousands of would-be writers out of millions of dollars with promises of having their work turned into salable books. In divulging the details of this colossal and shocking confidence game, Ten Percent of Nothing: The Case of the Literary Agent from Hell exposes a growing and serious crime against writers and a dark, ugly secret about the American publishing industry.

In 1989, Dorothy L. Deering, possessing a high school degree, a recent embezzlement conviction, and no experience as a professional writer, editor, or publisher, began operating a fee-based literary agency out of her garage in Nicholasville, Kentucky. Over the next ten years, she racked up a fortune in reading and marketing fees, learning the business of sham publishing as she went along. Later, as the owner of a vanity press, she bilked 1.5 million dollars out of her clients, masterfully manufacturing dreams of literary success until she was brought to justice by Fisher’s investigative journalism, an FBI probe, and the retaliation and testimonies of numerous victims.

Deering never sold a single manuscript to a major publisher. With the money in her pocket and her clients’ hopes and hard work wrapped up in fraudulent contracts, Deering produced a few copies of four cheaply printed, poorly edited paperbacks. These she used as bait to hoodwink more clients. She was abetted by her husband, Charles, a former car salesman; his son, Daniel, a drug user with a ninth-grade education; and her brother, Bill, a fugitive from the law at the time he headed her vanity press.

            

By successfully impersonating a literary agent for ten years, Deering operated one of the longest-running confidence games in American history. The financial loss for her clients was devastating, and the heartbreak was extreme. Drawing on victims’ experiences and documents recovered from the Deering venture, Fisher shows how Deering engineered and executed her scam, emphasizing the warning signs of sham agents, crook book doctors, and mendacious publishers.

Ten Percent of Nothing provides essential information for aspiring writers and publishing professionals. Fisher’s findings also prompt new inquiries into the potential licensing of literary agents and the prosecution of interstate scam artists. The volume’s gallery of illustrations includes reproductions of correspondence, newsletters, and advertisements used by the Deering operation.

Thirteen Loops: Race, Violence, and the Last Lynching in America recounts the story of three innocent victims, all of whom suffered violent deaths through no fault of their own: Vaudine Maddox in 1933 in Tuscaloosa, Sergeant Gene Ballard in 1979 in Birmingham, and Michael Donald in 1981 in Mobile.

The death of Vaudine Maddox—and the lynchings that followed—serves as a cautionary tale about the violence that occurred in the same region nearly fifty-years later, highlighting the cowardice, ignorance, and happenstance that sustained a culture of racial intolerance far into the future.Nearly half a century later, after a black bank robber was acquitted for the murder of police Sergeant Gene Ballard, two Klansmen took it upon themselves to exact revenge on an innocent victim--nineteen-year-old African American Michael Donald.  Donald's murder--deemed the last lynching in America--reignited the race debate in America and culminated in a courtroom drama in which the United Klans of America were at long last put on trial. 

While tracing the relationships among these murders, B. J. Hollars's research led him deep into the heart of Alabama’s racial, political, and legal landscapes.  A work of literary journalism, Thirteen Loops  draws upon rarely examined primary sources, court documents, newspaper reports, and first-hand accounts in an effort to unravel the twisted tale of a pair of interconnected murders that forever altered United States' race relations.

What soldiers do on the battlefield or boxers do in the ring would be treated as criminal acts if carried out in an everyday setting. Perpetrators of violence in the classical world knew this and chose their venues and targets with care: killing Julius Caesar at a meeting of the Senate was deliberate. That location asserted Senatorial superiority over a perceived tyrant, and so proclaimed the pure republican principles of the assassins.

The contributors to The Topography of Violence in the Greco-Roman World take on a task not yet addressed in classical scholarship: they examine how topography shaped the perception and interpretation of violence in Greek and Roman antiquity. After an introduction explaining the “spatial turn” in the theoretical study of violence, “paired” chapters review political assassination, the battlefield, violence against women and slaves, and violence at Greek and Roman dinner parties. No other book either adopts the spatial theoretical framework or pairs the examination of different classes of violence in classical antiquity in this way.

Both undergraduate and graduate students of classics, history, and political science will benefit from the collection, as will specialists in those disciplines. The papers are original and stimulating, and they are accessible to the educated general reader with some grounding in classical history.