"Peter Herman's expansive study causes us to question and reconsider what we think we know about terrorism and about those who engage in such acts. The range of the text - from the Gunpowder Plot to 9/11 - highlights the paradoxical impulses (to speak and not to speak) at the heart of any narrative about terrorism."

- Tim Gauthier, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

"This is a must-read book for anybody interested in the cultural interpretation of terrorism. By zooming in on the speakability/unspeakability paradox, characteristic of acts of terrorism, Peter Herman succeeds in revealing how literature and film create a counter-narrative that undoes simplistic ideological interpretations of political violence. His readings demonstrate how the possible worlds of fiction and film create a triangulating discourse that runs counter to the reductive us-versus-them rhetoric, current in journalistic and political interpretations of terrorist events."

-Professor emeritus Kristiaan Versluys, Ghent University, Belgium

"For Herman writers of fiction 'have always offered us the tools for a better understanding of terrorism. We just need to pay attention.' This scholarly, insightful, and illuminating book gives these writers their due attention, and it also shows how the one-dimensional representations it critiques have too often obscured our historical understanding of terrorism, and too often left us dangerously blind in one eye."

- Matthew Carr, Infernal Machine