Richard Price

In 1998, Richard Price returned to the gritty urban landscape of his national bestseller Clockers to produce Freedomland, a searing and unforgettable novel about a hijacked car, a missing child, and an embattled neighborhood polarized by racism, distrust, and accusation. Freedomland hit bestseller lists from coast to coast, including those of the Boston Globe, USA Today and Los Angeles Times; garnered universally rave reviews; and was selected as the Grand Prize Winner of the Imus American Book Award and as a New York Times Notable Book. On May 11, this highly lauded bestseller is available in paperback for the first time. A white woman, her hands gashed and bloody, stumbles into an inner-city emergency room and announces that she has just been carjacked by a black man. But then comes the horrifying twist: Her young son was asleep in the back seat, and he has now disappeared into the night.So begins Richard Price's electrifying new novel, a tale set on the same turf--Dempsey, New Jersey--as Clockers. Assigned to investigate the case of Brenda Martin's missing child is detective Lorenzo Council, a local son of the very housing project targeted as the scene of the crime. Under a white-hot media glare, Lorenzo launches an all-out search for the abducted boy, even as he quietly explores a different possibility: Does Brenda Martin know a lot more about her son's disappearance than she's admitting?Right behind Lorenzo is Jesse Haus, an ambitious young reporter from the city's evening paper. Almost immediately, Jesse suspects Brenda of hiding something. Relentlessly, she works her way into the distraught mother's fragile world, befriending her even as she looks for the chance to break the biggest story of her career.As the search for the alleged carjacker intensifies, so does the simmering racial tension between Dempsey and its mostly white neighbor, Gannon. And when the Gannon police arrest a black man from Dempsey and declare him a suspect, the animosity between the two cities threatens to boil over into violence. With the media swarming and the mood turning increasingly ugly, Lorenzo must take desperate measures to get to the bottom of Brenda Martin's story.At once a suspenseful mystery and a brilliant portrait of two cities locked in a death-grip of explosive rage, Freedomland reveals the heart of the urban American experience--dislocated, furious, yearning--as never before. Richard Price has created a vibrant, gut-wrenching masterpiece whose images will remain long after the final, devastating pages.From the Paperback edition.

He was the "Man in Black," a country music legend, and the quintessential American troubadour. He was an icon of rugged individualism who had been to hell and back, telling the tale as never before. In his unforgettable autobiography, Johnny Cash tells the truth about the highs and lows, the struggles and hard-won triumphs, and the people who shaped him. In his own words, Cash set the record straight - and dispelled a few myths - as he looked unsparingly at his remarkable life: from the joys of his boyhood in Dyess, Arkansas to superstardom in Nashville, Tennessee, the road of Cash's life has been anything but smooth. Cash writes of the thrill of playing with Elvis, the comfort of praying with Billy Graham; of his battles with addiction and of the devotion of his wife, June; of his gratitude for life, and of his thoughts on what the afterlife may bring. Here, too, are the friends of a lifetime, including Willie Nelson, Roy Orbison, Bob Dylan, and Kris Kristofferson. As powerful and memorable as one of his classic songs, Cash is filled with the candor, wit, and wisdom of a man who truly "walked the line."

Billy Strayhorn (1915-1967) was one of the most accomplished composers in the history of American music, the creator of a body of work that includes such standards as "Take the 'A' Train," "Lush Life," and "Something to Live For." Yet all his life Strayhorn was overshadowed by another great composer: his employer, friend, and collaborator, Duke Ellington, with whom he worked as the Ellington Orchestra's ace songwriter and arranger. Lush Life, David Hajdu's sensitive and moving biography of Strayhorn, is a corrective to decades of patchwork scholarship and journalism about this giant of jazz. It is also a vibrant, absorbing account of the "lush life" led by Strayhorn and other jazz musicians in Harlem and Paris. A musical prodigy who began a career as a composer while still a teenager in Pittsburgh, Strayhorn came to New York City at Duke Ellington's invitation in 1939; soon afterward he wrote "'A' Train," which became the signature song of the Ellington Orchestra, one of the most popular jazz bands in the country. For the next three decades, Strayhorn labored under a complex agreement whereby Ellington thrived in the role of public artist to Strayhorn's private one, often taking the bows for Strayhorn's work. Strayhorn was alternately relieved to be kept out of the limelight and frustrated about it. In Harlem and in the cafe society downtown, the small, shy black composer carried himself with singular style and grace as one of the few jazzmen to be openly homosexual. His compositions and elegant arrangements made him a hero to other musicians, but when he died at age fifty-two, his life cut short by alcohol abuse and cancer, few people fully understood the vital role he played in the Ellington Orchestra's development into a vehicle for some of the greatest, most ambitious American music of this century.

College graduate Peter is rejected by the law school of his choice, and during his year of working to enhance his credentials he utterly fouls every hope of law school, but heads back for Collegetown anyway.

Ray Mitchell, 43 ans, successivement professeur, chauffeur de taxi puis scénariste d'une série télévisée à succès, revient dans la cité de son enfance après le décès de sa mère. Il dirige bénévolement un atelier d'écriture dans son ancien lycée et tente d'aider comme il peut les personnes en difficulté qui l'entourent. Mais, après quelques semaines de travail, il est agressé dans son appartement.

Strike is "a street-smart teenaged dealer with a conscience, an ulcer ... and a lethal secret." Rocco is "a burnt-out homicide detective whose blind obsession for justice threatens to destroy the wrong man."--Cover.

After a lucrative television writing career comes to an abrupt end, ex--high school teacher Ray Mitchell returns to the New Jersey city of his birth--to rethink his life, reconnect with his teenage daughter and to spread the wealth on the housing project that reared him. He begins teaching again, embarks on an affair with a married woman from the old neighborhood and becomes a mentor to a former student recently released from jail.Then, disaster: he is found beaten nearly to death in his own apartment. He knows who did it, but he's not talking, and he refuses to press charges.It is up to Detective Nerese Ammons--a childhood acquaintance from the projects--to get Ray to tell her what happened.Alternating between investigations of the people in Ray's life most likely to do him harm and listening to his fevered ramblings about their shared past as he slips in and out of consciousness, Nerese is charged not only with uncovering the perpetrator of this assault but with understanding what kind of victim is more afraid of the truth than of his potential murderer.The Washington Post Book World has hailed Richard Price as having "the best equipment a novelist can have--that combination of muscularity, insight and compassion we might call heart." Samaritan is an electrifying story of crime and punishment, of character and place, of children and their keepers--a novel of literary suspense that explores what happens when, caught up in the drama of one's own generosity, too little is given, too little is understood and the results threaten to prove both tragic and deadly.From the Hardcover edition.

In this first-rate police procedural, Eric Cash, the 34-year-old bartender at Café Berkmann and a would-be screenwriter, ends up in jail as a murder suspect and it's up to two New York City police detectives to find out the truth.

"This fascinating book, edited by seasoned Times crime-beat veteran Kevin Flynn, captures the full sweep of the newspaper's reporting on the subject. It examines issues like incarceration, organized crime, and vice (from the Attica Correctional Facility riot to the powerful Medellín Cartel) as well as the infamous crimes that riveted the world ... With 70 photographs as well as reproductions of front-page stories, here are the noteworthy crime articles from The New York Times archives that are sure to engross readers"--

Roman psychologique (formation). Roman familial.

411 pages ; 23 cm

The Wanderers is a loosely plotted, autobiographical novel, in which author Ezekiel Mphahlele, through the protagonist Timi Tabane, continues the story of his life from the point at which his autobiography Down Second Avenue (1959) ends. Down Second Avenue describes Mphahlele{u2019}s years in the black townships and urban ghettos of South Africa, but The Wanderers concentrates on the period of exile in Nigeria and Kenya that followed his escape from South Africa in 1957. --www.enotes.com.