Mikita Brottman | |
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 Mikita Brottman, New Mercury Readings, Baltimore 2016 | |
| Born | 1966 (age 57–58) Sheffield, England, United Kingdom |
| Occupation(s) | Author, scholar, psychoanalyst |
Mikita Brottman is a British American non-fiction author, scholar, and psychoanalyst known for her interest in true crime. Her writing blends a number of genres, often incorporating elements of autobiography, psychoanalysis, forensic psychology, and literary history. [1]
Brottman was born in Sheffield, England, and educated at St. Hilda's College and St. Hugh's College, University of Oxford, from which she received a D.Phil in English Language and Literature (1994). [2]
She was Visiting Professor of Comparative literature at Indiana University and was Chair of the Program in Humanities with an emphasis in Depth Psychology at the Pacifica Graduate Institute from 2008 to 2010. [3] She is a certified psychoanalyst and a full faculty Professor in the Department of Humanistic Studies at the Maryland Institute College of Art, in Baltimore. [4] [5]
Brottman has also worked in the Maryland prison system and in forensic psychiatric facilities. [6]
Brottman's work has included writing on horror films, critical theory, reading, psychoanalysis, animals, and the work of the American folklorist, Gershon Legman. Her articles and case studies have appeared in The American Journal of Psychoanalysis , New Literary History , American Imago , and other journals. Her essays have also appeared in a number of books and anthologies. Her book The Solitary Vice: Against Reading (2009) was selected as one of the Best Books of 2009 by Publishers Weekly, who said: "Sharp, whimsical and impassioned, Brottman's look at the pleasures and perils of compulsive reading is itself compulsively readable and will connect with any book lover." [7] In 2018, a Spanish edition was published by Blackie Books, under the title Contra La Lectura. [8]
The most consistent focus of Brottman's work, however, is her reconsideration and transformation of the true crime genre. Thirteen Girls (Nine-Banded Books, 2012) is a story cycle of fictionalized narratives, each based on a real victim of a serial killer, each told from a different perspective. According to a review of the book in Rain Taxi, "Brottman’s grimly pragmatic literary stance recalls such earlier artists of the quotidian macabre as Shirley Jackson and Flannery O’Connor: Thirteen Girls is an impressive successor to their stories of American dread." [9] The Maximum Security Book Club: Reading Literature in a Men's Prison (2016) describes Brottman's relationship with nine inmates in a reading group she started at Jessup Correctional Institution, a men's maximum security prison, and their reactions to the works of classic literature they read together. [10]
An Unexplained Death - The True Story of a Body at the Belvedere (2018), is a discursive and philosophical meditation on suicide, voyeurism, missing people, deaths in hotels, and the author's obsessive investigation into the mysterious death of Rey Rivera in Baltimore's Belvedere Hotel in 2006. Described by James Ellroy as "a learned, lucid, and finally heartbreaking account of urban obsession," [11] the book was short-listed for the 2019 Gold Dagger for nonfiction by the Crime Writers' Association of the United Kingdom.
Couple Found Slain: After a Family Murder (Henry Holt, 2021) is a biography of Brian Bechtold, who was found not guilty by reason of insanity for the 1992 murder of his parents. According to The New York Times, "Brottman offers a precise and rarely seen accounting of American hospitals for the criminally insane. She argues, via her subject Brian Bechtold, that the system we have to shelter and heal people like him not only does not work, but is in fact far more damaging than incarceration." [3]
Guilty Creatures: Sex, God and Murder in Tallahassee, Florida (One Signal/Atria, 2024) examines the 2000 murder of Mike Williams. The New York Times described it as "an unputdownable read." [12]
Brottman is the partner of the American film critic David Sterritt. [13]
Julia Kristeva is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, semiotician, psychoanalyst, feminist, and novelist who has lived in France since the mid-1960s. She has taught at Columbia University, and is now a professor emerita at Université Paris Cité. The author of more than 30 books, including Powers of Horror, Tales of Love, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, Proust and the Sense of Time, and the trilogy Female Genius, she has been awarded Commander of the Legion of Honor, Commander of the Order of Merit, the Holberg International Memorial Prize, the Hannah Arendt Prize, and the Vision 97 Foundation Prize, awarded by the Havel Foundation.
Janet Clara Malcolm was an American writer, staff journalist at The New Yorker magazine, and collagist who fled antisemitic persecution in Nazi-occupied Prague. She was the author of Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (1981), In the Freud Archives (1984), and The Journalist and the Murderer (1990). Malcolm wrote frequently about psychoanalysis and explored the relationship between journalist and subject. She was known for her prose style and for polarizing criticism of her profession, especially in her most contentious work, The Journalist and the Murderer, which has become a staple of journalism-school curricula.
Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women, a women's prison in the town of Bedford, New York, is the only maximum security New York State women's prison. The prison previously opened under the name Westfield State Farm in 1901. It lies just outside the hamlet and census-designated place Bedford Hills, New York.
Attica Correctional Facility is a maximum security prison campus in the Town of Attica, New York, operated by the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision. It was constructed in the 1930s in response to earlier riots within the New York state prisons.
The Executioner's Song (1979) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning true crime novel by Norman Mailer that depicts the events related to the execution of Gary Gilmore for murder by the state of Utah. The title of the book may be a play on "The Lord High Executioner's Song" from Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado. "The Executioner's Song" is also the title of a poem by Mailer, published in Fuck You magazine in September 1964 and reprinted in Cannibals and Christians (1966), and the title of one of the chapters of his 1975 non-fiction book The Fight.
Robert John Bardo is an American man serving life imprisonment without parole after being convicted for the July 18, 1989, murder of American actress and model Rebecca Schaeffer, whom he had stalked for three years.
PopMatters is an international online magazine of cultural criticism that covers aspects of popular culture. PopMatters publishes reviews, interviews, and essays on cultural products and expressions in areas such as music, television, films, books, video games, comics, sports, theater, visual arts, travel, and the Internet.
Gershon Legman was an American cultural critic, folklorist, and author of The Rationale of the Dirty Joke (1968) and The Horn Book: Studies in Erotic Folklore and Bibliography (1964).
The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle is a historical novel by the American author Avi published in 1990. The book is marketed towards children at a reading level of grades 5–8. The book chronicles the evolution of the title character as she is pushed outside her naive existence and learns about life aboard a ship crossing from England to America in 1832. The novel was well received and won several awards, including being named as a Newbery Honor book in 1991.
Green Haven Correctional Facility is a maximum security prison in New York, United States. The prison is located in the Town of Beekman in Dutchess County. The New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision lists the address as Route 216, Stormville, New York 12582. This prison housed New York's execution chamber during the time the state briefly had the death penalty in the post-Furman era. It was originally a federal prison and now houses maximum security inmates. Green Haven Correctional Facility also operated a Hot Kosher Foods Program; but no longer does as of 2020. However, because of this, the prison had a large Jewish population. Yale Law School operates the Green Haven Prison Project, a series of seminars among Yale law students and Green Haven inmates on law and policy issues concerning prisons and criminal law.
The Riverbend Maximum Security Institution (RMSI) is a prison in Nashville, Tennessee, operated by the Tennessee Department of Correction. The prison opened in 1989 and replaced its 100-year-old neighbor, the Tennessee State Penitentiary. RMSI, which is made up by 20 different buildings, sits on 132 acres (0.53 km2) located off Cockrill Bend Boulevard in Nashville. Riverbend's designated capacity is 714 offenders. Of that number, 480 are classified as high risk.
William James Bosket Jr. is an American convicted murderer, whose numerous crimes committed while he was still a minor led to a change in New York state law, so that juveniles as young as 13 could be tried as an adult for murder and would face the same penalties. He has been in either prison or reformatories for all but 18 months since 1971, and has spent all but 100 days of his adult life in custody. He is currently serving a sentence of 82 years to life at Wende Correctional Facility.
Shawangunk Correctional Facility is a maximum security prison for males located in the Town of Shawangunk, Ulster County, New York in the United States. The facility lies just outside the Ulster County hamlet of Wallkill, whose post office serves it.
Hollywood Hex is a book by Mikita Brottman, an in-depth history of movies plagued with bad luck or perceived as cursed. The book deals with deaths on-set, copycat crimes, obsessed fans, bizarre coincidences, and other incidents which lead a film to be called "cursed".
Meat Is Murder: An Illustrated Guide to Cannibal Culture is a book originally published in 1998, which examines cannibalism in myth, true crime, and film.
Louis Ferrante is an American writer who was a former heist expert and Gambino crime family mobster. He spent eight and a half years in prison for heists and hijackings, successfully appealed his conviction and became a bestselling true crime, business, and science writer. He hosts his own show, airing on Discovery International in 195 countries and was nominated for a Grierson Trust Award.
Jacob R. Brussel was an antiquarian bookseller and publisher in New York City whose firm J.R. Brussel also dealt in erotica. For many years Jake Brussel operated a shop, under various names including Atlantis and Ortelius, on New York's famous Fourth Avenue "Book Row", initially in partnership with Samuel Weiser as "Weiser's Book Shop" until Weiser moved out to open his own shop across the street. He published large numbers of erotic and sexological reprints of works in the public domain in small editions, employing a job printer in a cellar around the corner, as well as the unauthorized bootleg "Medvsa" edition of Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller and Oragenitalism by Gershon Legman, a young employee in the Brussel bookshop. Others who worked in the shop in this era included Sol M. Malkin,, Keene Wallis, and Mahlon Blaine. In June 1928, Malkin, then a 19-year old clerk, was arrested in a police raid on the premises led by John Sumner, in which 1,500 books were seized. At that time the store was called the Ortelius Book Shop and was located at 134 E. 8th St., across the street from Wanamaker's. The shop's book scout was Jake's brother, I.R. "Ike" Brussel, a book hunter billed as "the last of the great scouts". In early 1940, the shop was raided by police and Brussel was sentenced to three years in jail on obscenity charges. After WWII, he carried on the storefront business while focusing largely on publishing under various imprints, including Brussel and Brussel, New York Medical Press, and United Book Guild.
It, also known as Pennywise, Robert 'Bob' Gray, and Pennywise the Dancing Clown, is the titular antagonist in Stephen King's 1986 horror novel It. The character is an ancient, trans-dimensional malevolent entity who preys upon the children of Derry, Maine, roughly every 27 years, using a variety of powers that include the ability of shapeshifting and manipulation of reality. During the course of the story, It primarily appears in the form of Pennywise the Dancing Clown. "The Losers Club" becomes aware of Pennywise's presence after it kills Bill Denbrough's little brother, Georgie.
Linda Hoy is a British author who is best known for her works for children and young adults.
Norman N. Holland was an American literary critic and Marston-Milbauer Eminent Scholar Emeritus at the University of Florida.
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