Violet Hours is a literary potpourri containing Watershed, a novel fragment, Aftermath, a disquisition, The Ventriloquist, a polemic, Indian Passage and Mother’s Day, two short stories, a travel article, and Anna, a play.

In Daniel Judson's powerful new thriller, Bridgehampton auto mechanic Caleb Rakowski gets paid under the table at his friend Eric Carver's auto repair shop and lives in an apartment above. He's good at his job, he's a hard worker, and he's making a decent living. But right now he's sheltering a pregnant friend who'll do anything to keep her abusive husband away from herself and her baby. Cal has sworn to protect her; that's the kind of guy he is, a true friend. Little does he know, though, the trouble destined to come down on them over the course of three days---Mischief Night, Halloween, and the Day of the Dead---when he learns the truth about Eric Carver and what he's been hiding all these years. And little does Cal know how those lies will force him to risk everything to save the people closest to him. Daniel Judson is a craftsman of modern noir, an incredibly talented writer in the vein of Ellroy or Chandler but with the Hamptons in all their glitz and stark shadows as his canvas. Like his two previous Hamptons novels, The Water's Edge and The Darkest Place, The Violet Hour is tightly drawn, hauntingly atmospheric, and completely searing.

Katherine Hill's Violet Hour is blazing debut about a woman who just can't stop herself from destroying what she loves most. For a moment that afternoon, it was only woman and water, the Bay in all its sickening glory squaring itself for a fight. Life hasn't always been perfect, but for Abe and Cassandra Green, an afternoon on the San Francisco Bay might be as good as it gets. He's a doctor piloting his new sailing boat. She's a sculptor finally getting a bit of recognition. Their beautiful daughter Elizabeth is off to Harvard at the end of the summer. But then there is a terrible row. Cassandra has been unfaithful. In a fit of insanity, Abe throws himself off the boat. A love story that begins with the end of a marriage, The Violet Hour follows a 21st century American family through past and present, from a lavish New York wedding to the family funeral home in suburban Washington, from a drunken PTA party to a scene of unexpected public violence. In this deeply resonant novel intimacy is fragile and the search for gratification breeds destruction. Here is a family ripped apart by desire. And here is a family possibly reborn. Katherine Hill was born in Washington, D.C., in 1982. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in many publications including n+1, The Believer, Bookforum, Colorado Review and the San Francisco Chronicle. This is her first novel.

From one of our most perceptive and provocative voices comes a deeply researched account of the last days of Susan Sontag, Sigmund Freud, John Updike, Dylan Thomas, Maurice Sendak, and James Salter—an arresting and wholly original meditation on mortality. In The Violet Hour, Katie Roiphe takes an unexpected and liberating approach to the most unavoidable of subjects. She investigates the last days of six great thinkers, writers, and artists as they come to terms with the reality of approaching death, or what T. S. Eliot called “the evening hour that strives Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea.” Roiphe draws on her own extraordinary research and access to the family, friends, and caretakers of her subjects. Here is Susan Sontag, the consummate public intellectual, who finds her commitment to rational thinking tested during her third bout with cancer. Roiphe takes us to the hospital room where, after receiving the worst possible diagnosis, seventy-six-year-old John Updike begins writing a poem. She vividly re-creates the fortnight of almost suicidal excess that culminated in Dylan Thomas’s fatal collapse at the Chelsea Hotel. She gives us a bracing portrait of Sigmund Freud fleeing Nazi-occupied Vienna only to continue in his London exile the compulsive cigar smoking that he knows will hasten his decline. And she shows us how Maurice Sendak’s beloved books for children are infused with his lifelong obsession with death, if you know where to look. The Violet Hour is a book filled with intimate and surprising revelations. In the final acts of each of these creative geniuses are examples of courage, passion, self-delusion, pointless suffering, and superb devotion. There are also moments of sublime insight and understanding where the mind creates its own comfort. As the author writes, “If it’s nearly impossible to capture the approach of death in words, who would have the most hope of doing it?” By bringing these great writers’ final days to urgent, unsentimental life, Katie Roiphe helps us to look boldly in the face of death and be less afraid. Praise for The Violet Hour “A beautiful book . . . The intensity of these passages—the depth of research, the acute sensitivity for declarative moments—is deeply beguiling.”—The New York Times Book Review “Profound, poetic and—yes—comforting.”—People “Unconventional, engaging . . . [The Violet Hour] is at once scholarly, literary, juicy—and unabashedly personal.”—Los Angeles Times “Enveloping . . . I read it in bed, at the kitchen table, while walking down the street. . . . ‘What normal person wants to blunder into this hushed and sacred space?’ she asks. But the answer is all of us, and Ms. Roiphe does it with grace.”—Jennifer Senior, The New York Times “A beautiful and provocative meditation on mortality.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune “A tender yet penetrating look at the final days . . . Roiphe has always seemed to me a writer to envy. No matter what the occasion, she can be counted on to marry ferocity and erudition in ways that nearly always make her interesting.”—The Wall Street Journal “Here is a critic in supreme control of her gifts, whose gift to us is the observant vigor that refuses to flinch before the Reaper. . . . She knows that true criticism does not bother with the mollification of delicate sensibilities, only with the intellect as it roils and rollicks through language.”—William Giraldi, The New Republic

Meet Violet She takes after her father… Private investigator Lawrence Hoskins has one job to do. Locate a teenage runaway. He knows what the young woman looks like, and with some degree of guesswork where she is. It should be a piece of cake. Except the client requesting the job is the missing teenager’s father, and also a cold-blooded murderer and fugitive on the run. When Hoskins first developed an alliance on a previous case with organized crime boss, Jimmy ‘The Drain’ Rosedale, he’d known it was only a matter of time before it would come back to bite him. And now that the man has resurfaced when he should be in hiding, the teeth that nip are sharper than ever. If Jimmy goes down, Hoskins goes with him. The only way to get the gangster off his back and out of his life for good is to do as he says. Find his daughter, whatever it takes. But as Hoskins soon learns, Jimmy’s kid is no ordinary young woman. How could she be? She may have changed her name, her appearance, and travelled three thousand miles to get away from home, but she can’t outrun who she really is – the daughter of a man with a price on his head so lucrative there are those who’ll do anything to find him. So when Hoskins discovers Jimmy’s daughter has exchanged one crime family for another, he knows they’re all in trouble. Because secrets never stay hidden for long. And crime bosses take deception very, very personally. The Violet Hour is a gritty crime novel, and the fifth book in the Hoskins & Fletcher series "So many questions, so much tension." "A breathtaking, heart-rending journey full of twists, turns and nail-biting moments." "This series just gets better and better." "A must-read story that I just could not put down, and now cannot wait for Book Six."

This flash-submission third issue is launched in honour of The Violet Hour Magazine's first Halloween in print, and is based on the themes of "Gothic" and "Macabre." It contains short fiction by Kevin M. Folliard and Alyson Faye, short non-fiction by Vivian Wagner, and poetry by Doc Wallace, Devon Balwit, Hannah Litvin, and many more.

"Flowers can't tell lies. If you keep the sun off of them, dry up their waterbeds, and throw in weeds to choke 'em out, ain't no way or reason for them to bloom. If a rose is in full bloom when you know it's only been kept in darkness, and the ground it's planted in is cracked and cold, don't stop to smell that rose. There's a trap somewhere in those tempting, dark red petals. There's deceit. Maybe even death. Run from that flowerbed. You don't want to get buried in that soil." It's a few weeks before her fortieth birthday, and Sienna finally has the life she's dreamed of: a husband who loves her, a private practice that's flourishing, and an extended family that has finally put its skeletons to rest. However, when a homeless woman named Sweet Violet comes under Sienna's care with nothing on her but broken memories and a pocket watch stopped at 5:11, Sienna knows the peaceful life she's been enjoying will come to a screeching halt. Despite her best attempts not to get too involved, Sienna quickly discovers the dangerous past of Sweet Violet, and decades-old secrets and shadows come creeping into the present with violent results. Further complicating matters is a shocking midlife surprise for Sienna, and an unwelcomed guest her son Roman brings home. Life and death, love and loss, remain on the line as Sienna seeks answers, ducks bullets, and tries to be a good wife.

He's waited twenty years. He'll wait no longer. A gripping stand-alone thriller by the author of the Sunday Times bestselling Byrne and Balzano series. Johnny Angel is found brutally murdered with a dead prostitute in his bed and a needle full of heroin in his arm. It's all the more shocking because he's a priest. But when Dr Bennett Marc Crane, a prestigious plastic surgeon, is the next victim of a vicious attack of the same manner, it becomes clear that there is a serial killer on the loose... And as this homicidal maniac exacts his vengeance upon more innocent victims, evidence of another long-buried crime is uncovered. One that starts with a Halloween celebration at an exclusive college party twenty years ago and ends with a murderous plan for delayed revenge. For Nicky Stella, a hungry journalist, this is just the sort of sordid story that could land him a cover article. But when he digs a bit too deep, the killer's attention turns towards Nicky and he must find the killer before he becomes the next victim...

At the Violet Hour offers a richly historicized, trenchant look at the interlocking of literature with violence in British and Irish modernist texts.