Down These Mean Streets

Down These Mean Streets

Author: Piri Thomas

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 1991

Total Pages: 334

ISBN-13: 9780679732389

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"A linguistic event. Gutter language, Spanish imagery and personal poetics . . . mingle into a kind of individual statement that has very much its own sound." --The New York Times Book Review Thirty years ago Piri Thomas made literary history with this lacerating, lyrical memoir of his coming of age on the streets of Spanish Harlem. Here was the testament of a born outsider: a Puerto Rican in English-speaking America; a dark-skinned morenito in a family that refused to acknowledge its African blood. Here was an unsparing document of Thomas's plunge into the deadly consolations of drugs, street fighting, and armed robbery--a descent that ended when the twenty-two-year-old Piri was sent to prison for shooting a cop. As he recounts the journey that took him from adolescence in El Barrio to a lock-up in Sing Sing to the freedom that comes of self-acceptance, faith, and inner confidence, Piri Thomas gives us a book that is as exultant as it is harrowing and whose every page bears the irrepressible rhythm of its author's voice. Thirty years after its first appearance, this classic of manhood, marginalization, survival, and transcendence is available in an anniversary edition with a new Introduction by the author.


Down These Mean Streets

Down These Mean Streets

Author: Keith R. A. DeCandido

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2005-08-30

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 1416509682

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The amazing adventures of Marvel Comics' Spider-Man continue in this all-new novel. A new designer drug with physically altering side effects sweeps through New York, leaving behind utter chaos. As Spider-Man stumbles onto the drug's origin, he almost must face one of his most fearsome enemies. Original.


Mean Streets

Mean Streets

Author: Jim Butcher

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2009-01-06

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 1440699941

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Four bestselling fantasy authors present a collection of novellas about dark nights, cruel cities, and paranormal P.I.s—featuring Harry Dresden, John Taylor, Harper Blaine, and Remy Chandler. #1 New York Times bestselling author Jim Butcher delivers a story in which Harry Dresden—Chicago's only professional wizard—tries to protect a friend from danger and ends up becoming a target himself... John Taylor is the best PI in the secret heart of London known as The Nightside. He can find anything. But locating the lost memory of a desperate woman may be his undoing in a thrilling noir tale from New York Times bestselling author Simon R. Green... National bestselling author Kat Richardson’s Greywalker finds herself in too deep when a job in Mexico goes awry, and Harper Blaine is enmeshed in a tangle of dark family secrets and revenge from beyond the grave... An ancient being that lived among humanity for centuries is dead, and fallen angel-turned-Boston detective Remy Chandler has been hired to find out who—or what—murdered him in a whodunit by national bestselling author Thomas E. Sniegoski...


Seven Long Times

Seven Long Times

Author: Piri Thomas

Publisher:

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 222

ISBN-13:

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Wounded and arrested while committing an armed robbery, Thomas begins his long seven years of incarceration first in the prison ward at Bellevue and then in Sing Sing and Great Meadows (Comstock). Thomas' great heart and tough street philosophy face off lyrically with the brutality of guards, the sterility of steel and cement, the perversity fostered on both sides of the bars by incarceration. Seven Long Times is the critically-acclaimed sequel to Thomas' classic of urban and prison literature, Down These Mean Streets.


You Can't Win

You Can't Win

Author: Jack Black

Publisher: Courier Dover Publications

Published: 2018-10-17

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0486826805

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"Much of this book is about loneliness. Yet its pages are bracingly companionable. It is one of the friendliest books ever written. It is a superb piece of autobiography, testimony that cannot be impeached. While it is a statement of an American tragedy, it has laughter, brevity, style; as a book to pass the time away with, it is in a class with the best fiction." — Carl Sandburg, New York World "Nothing half as rewarding has come down the highway of books about thieves, tramps, murderers, bootleggers and crooks in years " — New Republic "I believe Jack Black has written a remarkable book; it is vivid and picturesque; it is not fiction; it is a book that was needed and it should be widely read." — Clarence Darrow, New York Herald Tribune A major influence on William S. Burroughs and other Beat writers, this lost classic was written by Jack Black, a drifter and small-time criminal. Born in 1872, Black hit the road at the age of 16 and spent most of his life as a vagabond. In this plainspoken but colorful memoir, he recaptures a hobo underworld of the early twentieth century, a time when it was possible to pass anonymously from town to town. Black's firsthand accounts of hopping trains, burglaries, prison, and drug addiction offer a compelling portrait of life outside the law and honor among thieves.


Down These Strange Streets

Down These Strange Streets

Author: George R. R. Martin

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2012-12-04

Total Pages: 498

ISBN-13: 193700791X

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In this collection of urban fantasy stories, editors George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois explore the places where mystery waits at the end of every alley and where the things that go bump in the night have something to fear... In “Death by Dahlia,” #1 New York Times bestselling author Charlaine Harris takes vampire Dahlia Lynley-Chivers to a lavish party that turns deadly. And with so many creatures of the night in attendance, Dahlia will have a hard time identifying the most likely suspect! #1 New York Times bestselling author Patricia Briggs thrills in “In Red, with Pearls,” as a werewolf PI races to crack a case involving zombies, witches, and the most horrifying creatures of them all—lawyers. In “Lord John and the Plague of Zombies,” New York Times bestselling author Diana Gabaldon follows Lord John as he journeys to the beautiful but faintly sinister island paradise of Jamaica, where he’s soon investigating a mystery with no shortage of spiders, snakes, revolutionaries, and, of course, zombies. With these and thirteen more original tales, Down These Strange Streets takes you to the cities where fantasy and mystery collide and where private eyes who have seen it all find something lurking that is stranger still...


Women of the Mean Streets: Lesbian Noir

Women of the Mean Streets: Lesbian Noir

Author: J.M. Redmann

Publisher: Bold Strokes Books Inc

Published: 2011-07-01

Total Pages: 335

ISBN-13: 1602825386

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Women. Crime. Justice. At least the search for it. On the mean streets, the back allies, the dark corners. These are stories of tough women in hard places. The nights are long, the women are fast, and danger is always a short block or quick minute away. Edited by award winning author/editors J.M. Redmann and Greg Herren, Women of the Mean Streets is an anthology of some of the top, tough women crime writers today, noir stories with a lesbian twist.


Killing Willis

Killing Willis

Author: Todd Bridges

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2010-04-03

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 1439155895

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The former child star—best known as Willis Jackson on Diff’rent Strokes—shares the shocking but inspirational details of his struggles with addiction, brushes with the law, and fierce fight to carve a path through the darkness and find his true identity. For Todd Bridges early stardom was no protection from painful childhood events that paved the road to his own personal hell. One of the first African-American child actors on shows like Little House on the Prairie, The Waltons, and Roots, Bridges burst to the national forefront on the hit sitcom Diff’rent Strokes as the subject of the popular catchphrase, "What’chu Talkin About Willis?" When the show ended, Bridges was overwhelmed by the off-camera traumas he had faced. Turning to drugs as an escape, he soon lost control. Now, for the first time, Bridges opens up about his life before and after Diff’rent Strokes: the incredible reversals of fortune brought on by fame and the precipitous—and very public—descent that followed; the persecution from police; the drug addiction that nearly consumed him; the criminal charges that almost earned him a life sentence; and his successful legal defense led by Johnnie Cochran. Through it all, Bridges never relented in his quest to fight his way back from the abyss, establish his own identity—separate from Willis Jackson—and offer his ordeal as a positive example for those struggling to overcome similar challenges. His triumphant story of recovery and redemption is recounted here as well. Todd Bridges has lived a life of remarkable twists and turns—from the greatest heights to the lowest lows imaginable. In this shocking but ultimately hopeful memoir, he proves that what he was really talking about was survival.


Stories from El Barrio

Stories from El Barrio

Author: Piri Thomas

Publisher: Graymalkin Media

Published: 2017-11-03

Total Pages: 94

ISBN-13: 1631680714

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In these eight stories Piri Thomas takes us with him into El Barrio—Puerto Rico in New York City—and recreates the scenes he knows so well from his own childhood. He leads us through streets teaming with life, up crumbling front stoops, down dark hallways, into crowded rooms, and into the hearts and minds of his people. He takes us into the ring for a hard-fought boxing match and out of the city on a Boy Scout outing. He sits us in the barber’s chair and right under the burning scalp of a kid getting his hair straightened. He puts us into a boy’s mind for a wild fantasy trip, and into the heart of a sixteen-year-old trying to impress a pretty girl. He draws vivid stories from his part experiences and makes us feel what it means to be poor and proud and generous; to be streetwise and full of bravado but frightened, too; to struggle to go straight; to be ashamed of being ashamed; to dream. Piri Thomas, who reached thousands of readers with his bestselling autobiography, Down These Mean Streets, now gives young readers a vivid slice of the life in El Barrio—a place where people face their problems with energy, ingenuity, and love. Speaking in the voice of the streets and from his heart, he captures their spirit, their laughter, and their hope.