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Wickedness and Folly
Paperback
Publisher: Leftover Books
Published: Mar 10 2026
Pages: 132
Weight: 0.30
Height: 0.31 Width: 5.00 Depth: 8.00
Language: English
While hunting a wolf in 1940s New Mexico, a man uncovers a rural crime scene and stumbles into a curious anchorite who changes the course of his life; a runaway teen in search of drugs with which to commit suicide discovers that life may be worth living after all when he collides with someone who wants him dead; two small-time gangsters encounter one calamity after another when trying to dispose of their friend's body; a reprobate embarks on a surreal odyssey to retrieve heroin, hoping that it will unite his fallen relationship. As these characters, whose lives are often a quarter-turn out of level, lash out like a thunderclap at the world around them, they either find redemption, or utter ruin. Donovan Whitley's people are from the desolate stretches of Kansas, and the boiling desert-lands of New Mexico. They are haunted, richly alive-they are survivors.
A gripping debut book from a writer to watch, Wickedness and Folly will haunt readers with its unique voice and engrossing style.
Whitley's characters make my skin itch, and his writing makes me worry. That's the mark of good noir. These stories floored me, then picked me up and slapped me awake. Keep an eye out.
-Anthony Neil Smith, author of Yellow Medicine and Slow Bear
A stark, unforgiving force of nature that combines the best elements of noir and literature.
-Frank Bill, author of Donnybrook and Back to the Dirt
The grit lit nephew of Larry Brown and William Gay ... To read WICKEDNESS AND FOLLY is to sidle up to the bar and listen to your favorite town drunks tell you their dirty jokes and folktales about a charismatic and rascally cast of delinquents, miscreants, and ne'er-do-wells doing what they need to do to survive life in the rotten parts of Middle America.
-BULL Magazine
... Whitley has a knack for crafting gritty, sharp-edged scenes with clipped sentences that spike the tension and capture the frenetic, unstable characters on the fringes of society ...
-KIRKUS REVIEWS
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