"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.

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.

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...

Down These Mean Streets a Man Must Go: Raymond Chandler's Knight

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.

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.

About youth crime and homelessness in Canada.