New Dominion Bookshop will host a book reading and signing with true crime writer Rachel Monroe on Saturday, Sept. 14, from 7-8 p.m.
Monroe’s true crime nonfiction book, Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession, will be released from Scribner this month. This event is free to attend.
“In Savage Appetites, Rachel Monroe brings a rigorous and illuminating gaze to some of our most disturbing fascinations. Ultimately, she summons generosity and nuance for the discussion of hungers we might be tempted to dismiss entirely, asking revealing questions that are ultimately questions about the nature of desire itself: for intimacy, for freedom, for a sense of meaning. I read this book in a single day, but I know I’ll be thinking about it for years to come—especially its keen appreciation for the mystery of what drives us through this world.” —Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams and The Recovering
About the Book
In Savage Appetites, Monroe interrogates the appeal of true crime through four narratives of fixation. In the 1940s, a frustrated heiress began creating dollhouse crime scenes depicting murders, suicides, and accidental deaths. In the aftermath of the Manson Family murders, a young woman moved into Sharon Tate’s guesthouse and, over the next two decades, entwined herself with the Tate family. In the mid-nineties, a landscape architect in Brooklyn fell in love with a convicted murderer, the supposed ringleader of the West Memphis Three, through an intense series of letters. After they married, she devoted her life to getting him freed from death row. And in 2015, a teenager deeply involved in the online fandom for the Columbine killers planned a mass shooting of her own. Savage Appetites is a scrupulous exploration of empathy, justice, and the persistent appeal of violence.
About the Author
Rachel Monroe is a freelance writer and volunteer firefighter living in Marfa, Texas. She was a 2016 finalist for a Livingston Award for Young Journalists and was named one of the “queens of nonfiction,” along with Susan Orlean, Rebecca Solnit, and Joan Didion, by New York Magazine in 2016. Her essay about murder fandom and adolescence, “Outside the Manson Pinkberry,” originally published in The Believer, is anthologized in The Best American Travel Writing 2018. She is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and regularly writes for the New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, New York Magazine, Texas Monthly, The Guardian, and others.
About New Dominion Bookshop
Serving Albemarle and Central Virginia since 1924, New Dominion Bookshop is the oldest independent bookseller in Virginia. Located in Historic Downtown Charlottesville, New Dominion is a general trade bookshop that serves as the hub for readings and other literary events in the community. For more information, visit ndbookshop.com.
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