Narrative Criminology

Lois Presser and Sveinung Sandberg are onto something with this smart, beautifully organized collection of rich essays, each showing the importance of the & narrative turn not only to sociology and across disciplines, but to criminology. The collection shows how people involved with crime, and criminologists ourselves, use narrative all the time even though, until now, we may not have known why.This book is bound to be the & go to volume about the centrality of stories to the criminological enterprise. ~Lynn Chancer,author of High Profile Crimes: When Legal Cases Become Social Causes

This is an impressively global collection of case studies. Together these demonstrate the flexibility, ubiquity and enduring utility of the concept of narrative for criminology. It is shown to be both an analytic tool for scholars and a resource shaping action and belief in the lifeworld. By exploring and highlighting these two properties this book provides a valuable service to cultural criminology. ~Philip Smith,author of Punishment and Culture

[The book] is positioned to draw on insights and methods from a vast field of inquiryand make the case for narrative as an important and putatively neglected perspectivefor understanding matters of crime and justice. In this volume, Lois Presser andSveinung Sandberg bring together a set of contributions designed to do just that. ~Cultural Sociology

This is a most interesting, rather eclectic collection of papers presented within an allegedly new category of & narrative criminology. Essentially, the editors maintain the importance of storytelling for a better understanding of & crime, and, of course, are quite right to do so. Summing Up: Highly recommended. ~Choice