Naben Ruthnum

Dimitri Nasrallah’s The Bleeds is a doubly hybrid novel: both a literary-slash-international-thriller and a bricolage of blog entries, newspaper clippings, and traditional first-person narration recounting the story of family dictatorship. The setting, which appears only in the running header of the novel’s inserted newspaper articles until it is eventually revealed as a republic “along the Middle Eastern-Transcaucasian fault line” near the end of the…

The multi-hyphenated subgenre to which Eve Lazarus’s Blood, Sweat and Fear: The Story of Inspector Vance, Vancouver’s First Forensic Investigator belongs—historical–forensic–true-crime—aligns multiple aspects of our cultural fascination with crime. It bundles deep social history with the satisfactions of science’s absolute-truth crime-solving promise and, in some texts, pornographically gory splatter. Lazarus’s Vancouver-centralized history, presented as a chronicle of the career of Inspector John…