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 a new edition.

As Triple X, a brand-new designer drug with devastating side effects, sweeps through the streets of New York, high school science teacher Peter Parker--and his alter ego Spider-Man--begins to suspect the drug may have originated with one of his most diabolical enemies, intent on destroying the arachnid superhero for all time. Original.

Still relevant today, Piri Thomas's classic memoir of the "barrio" of SpanishHarlem celebrates its 30th anniversary of publication with a new Introductionby the author.

European historian Corboz takes the previous European analyses of the American city to task, centering his critical eye on the terrain of postmodern Los Angeles.