Deni Ellis Bechard

My Favourite Crime: Essays and Journalism from Around the World Deni Ellis Bechard

My Favourite Crime is a collection of essays that are at once personal and political. The first section describes the author's tumultuous relationship with his father, exploring his struggle to make sense of his father's criminality as well as his own, and the temptation to lapse back into crime when one has been raised with it. The ways that writing can help us transform our understanding of our family and of ourselves, and give us a new future, is a recurrent theme. The second section is long-form journalism and continues the theme of writing with several stories from overseas: illuminated gospels on Patmos, the Greek isle where St. John composed the Apocalypse and where refugees are locked in a house without food or water; an American soldier who transitions between genders while serving in Afghanistan; children accused of sorcery who are exorcised in Kinshasa's revival churches; female vigilantes and women's coalitions as a response to rape culture in India. The third section is a collection of dispatches from Afghanistan, describing expat life there along with observations about the war, and the fourth contains selected articles from a number of countries: Cuba, Colombia, Iraq, Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Québec, and the United States. The final section includes essays on writing, especially the importance of political writing.