One day George Arthur Rose, hack writer and minor priest, discovers that he has been picked to be Pope. He is hardly surprised and not in the least daunted.

The Hall of Uselessness gathers the finest of Leys’s essays for an American audience for the first time.

With barbed insouciance, Charles Duff writes not only of hanging but of electrocution, decapitations, and gassings; of innocent men executed and of executions botched; of the bloodlust of mobs and the shabby excuses of the great.

Don Carpenter's Hard Rain Falling is a tough as nails account of being down and out, but not quite down for good; a Dostoevskian tale of crime, punishment, and the pursuit of an ever-elusive redemption.