|
|
African American Literature Book Club - The #1 Site for "Readers of Black Literature" |
|
|
|
|
|
Read the transcript of an On-line chat with Walter Mosley from BarnesandNoble.com dated Thursday, November 13, 1997. Read about the books from Mosley's Easy Rawling's Series
Hardcover: 320 pages
A brand-new mystery series from one of the country’s best-known, best-loved writers: a new character, a new city, a new era. A new Walter Mosley.
His name is etched on the door of his Manhattan office: LEONID McGILL ,
PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR. It’s a name that takes a little explaining, but
he’s used to it. “Daddy was a communist and great-great- Granddaddy was
a slave master from Scotland. You know, the black man’s family tree is
mostly root. Whatever you see aboveground is only a hint at the real
story.”
Hardcover: 288 pages Living in South Central L.A., Socrates Fortlow is a sixty-year-old ex-convict, still strong enough to kill men with his bare hands. Now freed after serving twenty-seven years in prison, he is filled with profound guilt about his own crimes and disheartened by the chaos of the streets. Along with his gambler friend Billy Psalms, Socrates calls together local people of all races from their different social stations—lawyers, gangsters, preachers, Buddhists, businessmen—to conduct meetings of a Thinkers’ Club, where all can discuss the unanswerable questions in life. The street philosopher enjoins his friends to explore—even in the knowledge that there’s nothing that they personally can do to change the ways of the world—what might be done anyway, what it would take to change themselves. Infiltrated by undercover cops, and threatened by strain from within, tensions rise as hot-blooded gangsters and respectable deacons fight over issues of personal and social responsibility. But simply by asking questions about racial authenticity, street justice, infidelity, poverty, and the possibility of mutual understanding, Socrates and his unlikely crew actually begin to make a difference. In turns outraged and affectionate, The Right Mistake offers a profoundly literary and ultimately redemptive exploration of the possibility of moral action in a violent and fallen world.
Hardcover: 190
pages The Tempest Tales, Walter Mosley's newest book which we [Black Classic Press] are publishing. The wise folks at Essence [magazine] selected Tempest as the Book of the Month. It should be in bookstores the first part of May [2008]. This is the third book we've done with Walter, who continues to keep his values around supporting Black independent publishing front and center. We’ve got a big job to do on marketing Tempest and getting the word out. This is an exciting challenge. —Paul Coates, founder Black Classic Press About the Book
Hardcover: 208 pages In this
icy noir from a master of American fiction, the darkest secrets are the
ones we keep Ben Dibbuk has a good job, an accomplished wife, a bright college-age daughter, and a patient young mistress. Even as he goes through the motions of everyday life, however, inside he feels nothing. The explanation for this emotional void lies in the years he spent as a blacked-out drunk before pulling his life together—years in which he knows he committed acts he doesn’t remember. Then a woman from his past turns up at a gala for his wife’s new gig at a magazine called Diablerie and makes it clear that she remembers something he doesn’t. Their encounter sets wheels in motion that will propel Dibbuk toward new knowledge, and perhaps the chance to feel again. With the same erotic force as Killing Johnny Fry, but grounded in a far darker vision of human nature, Diablerie is a transfixing new novel from one of our most powerful writers.
Mass Market Paperback: 352 pages Fearless Jones and Paris Minton, stars of the bestsellers Fearless
Jones and Fear Itself, return in a high-velocity, larger-than-life
thriller about family, betrayal, and revenge.
ISBN: 0316065412 "With Mosley as instructor, how can your novel go wrong?"
–Library Journal No more excuses. "Let the lawn get shaggy and the paint peel
from the walls," bestselling novelist Walter Mosley advises. Anyone can write a
novel now, and in this essential book of tips, practical advice, and wisdom,
Walter Mosley promises that the writer-in-waiting can finish it in one year.
Intended as both inspiration and instruction, the book provides the tools to
turn out a first draft painlessly and then revise it into something finer.
Mosley tells how to: - Create a daily writing regimen to fit any writer's
needs-- and how to stick to it. - Determine the narrative voice that's right for
every writer's style. - Get past those first challenging sentences and into the
heart of a story.
ISBN: 159691226X
This bold new novel from Walter Mosley startles in both its rawness and its
honest portrayal of a man on a quest for sexual redemption in midlife. When
Cordell Carmel catches his longtime girlfriend with another man, the act that he
witnesses seems to dissolve all the boundaries he knows. In that instant, the
calm existence of this middle-aged New York City man becomes something
unrecognizable: he wants revenge, but also something more. Killing Johnny Fry is
the story of Cordell's dark, funny, soulful, and outrageously explicit sexual
odyssey in search of a new way of life. His guide is a mysterious woman named
Sisypha, who leads him deep into the erotic heart of the city.
Killing Johnny Fry marks new territory for Walter Mosley, bestselling author of
Devil in a Blue Dress and many other books in different genres: sci-fi,
politics, literary fiction. It will surprise, provoke, inspire, and make you
blush. Above all, it is about a man questioning the rules we take for
granted--and the powerful and sometimes disturbing connections that occur
between people when these rules are removed.
Hardcover: 224 pages Ushering in momentous change in comic-book illustration and ingenuity, Jack Kirby's immense artistic contribution to Fantastic Four #1 revolutionized visual storytelling and brought the art of reality to the extraordinary lives of super-heroes. The ripple effects of that single issue continue to influence comic-book art to this day. As a tribute to Kirby's rendering of Marvel's First Family and their first adventure, Maximum Fantastic Four re-presents Fantastic Four #1 as you've never seen it before - highlighted by a super-size, digitally remastered, panel-by-panel exploration of the entire issue that captures every single detail and nuance of Kirby's groundbreaking artwork. The book also contains a substantial introduction and afterword by bestselling author and comic-book enthusiast Walter Mosley; art commentary by Kirby expert Mark Evanier; the stunning design of Paul Sahre; and a scale-sized, high-resolution reproduction of FF #1.This immaculately packaged coffee-table masterpiece is must-have for any Jack Kirby enthusiast, Fantastic Four fanatic, or sequential art fan!
Paperback: 128 pages A passionate examination of the social and economic injustices that continue to shackle the American people ". . . bracing and provocative. . . ."
ISBN: 0316114715 New York Times bestselling author Walter Mosley's novel about two boys, one ensconced in a life of privilege and the other in a life of hardship, explores the true meaning of fortune. In spite of remarkable differences, Eric and Tommy are as close as brothers. Eric, a Nordic Adonis, is graced by a seemingly endless supply of good fortune. Tommy is a lame black boy, cursed with health problems, yet he remains optimistic and strong. After tragedy rips their makeshift family apart, the lives of these boys diverge astonishingly: Eric, the golden youth, is given everything but trusts nothing; Tommy, motherless and impoverished, has nothing, but feels lucky every day of his life. In a riveting story of modern-day resilience and redemption, the two confront separate challenges, and when circumstances reunite them years later, they draw on their extraordinary natures to confront a common enemy and, ultimately, save their lives.
ISBN: 1560258462 "Life Out of Context begins as a brooding examination of Mosley's own sense of cultural dislocation as an African-American writer. But die to a series of serendipitous events - the screening of a documentary about Africa, an inspiring encounter with Harry Belafonte and Hugh Masekela - Mosley has a set of epiphanies that turns the focus away from him. What can we do to fight injustice, poverty, exploitation, and racism? What is globalization doing to us?" Through these late-night meditations, Mosley attempts to transcend his earlier feelings of living a "life out of context" and seeks instead to find a political context. He ends with a call to arms, proposing that African-Americans have to break their historic ties with the Democratic Party and form a party of their own. Mosley writes, "Economic globalism has pressed many lives out of context. It's about time we push back."
ISBN: 0446533637 The New York Times bestselling author returns to science fiction with an eerie, transcendent novel of the near future. Errol's father has been dead for several years. Yet lately Errol has been awakened in the middle of the night by a caller claiming to be his father. Is it a prank, or a message from the grave? When he hears the unmistakable sound of a handset being put down on a table, he decides to investigate. Curious and not a little unnerved, Errol sneaks into the graveyard where his father is buried. What he finds there changes his life forever. Caught up in a war between a secret government security agency and an alien presence infecting our world, touched by the Wave, he knows that nothing will ever be the same again.
ISBN: 0316110353 Number 47, a fourteen-year-old slave boy growing up under the watchful eye of a brutal master in 1832, meets the mysterious Tall John, who introduces him to a magical science and also teaches him the meaning of freedom. The story you are about to read concerns certain events that occurred in the early days of my life. It all happened over a hundred and seventy years ago. For many of you it might sound like a tall tale because I am no older today than I was back in the year 1832. But this is no whopper I'm telling; it is a story about my boyhood as a slave and my fated encounter with the amazing Tall John from beyond Africa, who could read dreams, fly between galaxies, and make friends with any animal no matter how wild. In his first book for young adults, bestselling author Walter Mosley weaves
historical and speculative fiction into a powerful narrative about the nature of
freedom. 47 is a young slave boy living under the watchful eye of a brutal slave
master. His life seems doomed until he meets a mysterious runaway slave, Tall
John. 47 soon finds himself swept up in an otherworldly battle and a personal
struggle for his own liberation.
ISBN: 0786278552 New York Times bestseller Walter Mosley's sizzling new novel pits Easy Rawlins against his greatest challenge ever--a terrifying murder during the Summer of Love. It is the Summer of Love as CINNAMON KISS opens, and Easy Rawlins is contemplating robbing an armored car. It's farther outside the law than Easy has ever traveled--but his daughter, Feather, needs a medical treatment that costs far more than Easy can earn or borrow in time. And his friend Mouse tells him it's a cinch. Then another friend, Saul Lynx, offers a job that might solve Easy's problem without jail time. He has to track the disappearance of an eccentric prominent attorney. His assistant of sorts, the beautiful "Cinnamon" Cargill, is gone as well. Easy can tell there is much more than he is being told--Robert Lee, his new employer, is as suspect as the man who disappeared. But his need overcomes all concerns, and he plunges into unfamiliar territory, from the newfound hippie enclaves to a vicious plot that stretches back to the battlefields of Europe.
ISBN: 0316073032 Easy Rawlins returns to solve a mystery set amid the flames of the hottest summer L.A. has ever seen. Just after devastating riots tear through Los Angeles in 1965 - when anger is high and fear still smolders everywhere - the police turn up at Easy Rawlins's doorstep. He expects the worst, as usual. But they've come to ask for his help. A man was wrenched from his car by a mob at the riots' peak and escaped into a nearby apartment building. Soon afterward, a redheaded woman known as Little Scarlet was found dead in that building - and the fleeing man is the obvious suspect. But the man has vanished. The police fear that their presence in certain neighborhoods could spark a new inferno, so they ask Easy Rawlins to see what he can discover. The vanished man is the key, but he is only the beginning. Easy enlists the help of his longtime friend Mouse to break through the shroud. And what Easy finds is a killer whose rage, like that which burned in the city for weeks, is intrinsically woven around deep-set passions - feelings echoed within Easy himself. Mosley's lean and musical vernacular captures the heat and the rhythm
of Los Angeles' heart, where danger is the common currency of everyday life.
Little Scarlet is further proof that Mosley is "a master of mystery"
ISBN: 0316570826 The man at Charles Blakey's door has a proposition almost too strange for words. He wants to spend the summer in Charles's basement, and Charles cannot even begin to guess why. The beautiful house has been in the Blakey family for generations, but Charles has just lost his job and is behind on his mortgage payments. The money would be welcome. But Charles Blakey is black and Anniston Bennet is white, and it is clear that the stranger wants more than a basement view. There is something deeper and darker about his request, and Charles does not need any more trouble. But financial necessity leaves him no choice.
Once Anniston Bennet is installed in his basement, Charles is cast into a role
he never dreamed of. Anniston has some very particular requests for his
landlord, and try as he might, Charles cannot avoid being lured into Bennet's
strange world. At first he resists, but soon he is tempted - tempted by the
opportunity to understand the secret ways of white folks. Tempted to understand
a set of codes that has always eluded him. Charles's summer with a man in his
basement turns into an exploration of inconceivable worlds of power and
manipulation, and unimagined realms of humanity.
Format:
Paperback, 124pp. A message from the publisher about What Next In What Next, Walter Mosley -- New York Times bestselling author -- has crafted a deeply personal and political proposal, offering a commonsense approach to the challenge of finding world peace in a post-9/11 world. Mosley recalls his father’s story about not feeling like an American until German soldiers shot at him during World War II. Now the younger Mosley explores what the terrorist attacks meant to him, and challenges African Americans to use their unique position to help create a new kind of peace between the U.S. and the rest of the world. What Next examines this and other questions in a powerful polemic and call to action for African Americans and freedom-loving people everywhere.
Format:
Hardcover, 208pp. For years, readers have been enthralled by the adventures of Easy Rawlins, the unforgettable hero created by bestselling and award-winning writer Walter Mosley. In Six Easy Pieces Mosley presents a collection of six NEW Easy Rawlins short stories. . .sure to please fans that have long awaited his return.
Format:
Hardcover, 356pp. "Life in America a generation from now isn't much different from today: The drugs are better, the daily grind is worse. The gap between the rich and the poor has widened to a chasm. You can store the world's legal knowledge on a chip in your little finger, while the Supreme Court has decreed that constitutional rights don't apply to any individual who challenges the system. Justice is swiftly delivered by automated courts, so the prison industry is booming. And while the media declare racism is dead, word on the street is that even in a colorless society, it's a crime to be black." "But the world still turns and folks still have to get by with the hands they're dealt, folks such as:" "Ptolomy "Popo" Bent: This gentle backwoods child has a genius I.Q. - and a soul so pure that officials want him locked up forever." "Folio Johnson: A hardboiled, cyber-augmented private eye who can see beneath the dark poetry of the metropolis, he will need an even greater edge than that to find out who's systematically murdering rich, young Nazis." Fera Jones: She's the boxing Queen of the Ring who must still fight all comers to save her dad, preserve her identity, and protect the fans who believe in her.
Format: Hardcover, 320pp. From the Book Jacket
Format:
Pop Up Book, 1st ed., 272pp. "Socrates Fortlow, an ex-convict forced to define his own morality in a lawless world, confronts wrongs that most people would rather ignore and comes face-to-face with the most dangerous emotion: hope. It has been nine years since his release from prison, and he still makes his home in a two-room shack in a Watts alley. But he has a girlfriend now, a steady job, and he is even caring for a pet, the two-legged dog he calls Killer. These responsibilities make finding the right path even harder - especially when the police make Socrates their first suspect in every crime within six blocks." "In each chapter of Walkin' the Dog, Socrates challenges a different conundrum of modern life. In "Blue Lightning," he is offered a better-paying job but has to consider whether the extra pay is worth the freedom he would have to give up. In "Promise," he keeps a vow made long ago to a dying friend, and learns that a promise to one person can mean damage to another. In "Mookie Kid," he gets a telephone and learns that the price of being able to reach others is that others can contact him - whether he wants to be reached or not."-- Book jacket. "The stories are delightful, nothing overly powerful just pleasant little journeys. At first glance one could think that a book of this nature could be easily written but I think not. There is an art to what Mosley does with a story, without being preachy he delivers subtle little messages through the thoughts of Socrates and his friends. It's an easy fast read, I enjoyed it." -- Carey, comments originally posted on AALBC discussion board (11/18/99)
Hardcover: 244 pages Read Chapter One from Gone Fishin' The setting: Houston, 1939. Easy and Mouse are young men just setting out in life. Easy has yet to develop his skill for unraveling the secrets of others, and Mouse has yet to kill his first man. All will soon change. Easy and Mouse come of age in Gone Fishin' as they are compelled to examine their friendship and other relationships that have shaped their lives. Both young men take a closer look at their love and memories of their mothers and are forced to deal with the fathers in their lives - Easy yearning for the one he hardly knew, Mouse vengeful over the one he was left. Out of these memories and interactions, each must somehow forge his own sense of manhood.
Hardcover: 208 pages Read a sample chapter from this book. Three decades ago, the young Socrates had, in a burst of drunken rage, murdered a man and a woman with his huge "rock-breaking hands." Twenty-seven years of hard time in an Indiana prison followed. Now Socrates lives in a cramped two-room apartment in an abandoned building in Watts, scavenging bottles and delivering groceries for a supermarket. In each of the linked stories that comprise this richly brooding work, Socrates, like his namesake, explores philosophical questions of morality in a world beset with crime, poverty, and racism. He is an unforgettable presence and his perceptions cast a glow of somber lyricism upon an often harsh world.
Related Links Video - Howard Zinn & Walter Mosley - Excerpt from
Conversation, July 21st 2007 at the Harlem Book Fair (11:22 mins)
Walter Mosley Website
|
The Long Fall
The Right Mistake:
The Further Philosophical Investigations of Socrates Fortlow
The Tempest Tales
Diablerie
Fear of the Dark: A
Novel
This Year You Write
Your Novel
Killing Johnny Fry
Maximum Fantastic
Four (Graphic Novel, Hardcover)
Workin' on the Chain Gang: Shaking Off the Dead Hand of History
Fortunate
Son
Life
out of Context
The Wave
47
Cinnamon Kiss
Little
Scarlet: An Easy Rawlins Mystery
The Man in My
Basement: A Novel
What
Next: A Memoir Toward World Peace
Six
Easy Pieces 
Futureland: Nine
Stories of an Imminent World
Fearless Jones
AALBC.com
Home |
Advertise |
Discussion |
Chat |
Books |
Fun Stuff | About AALBC.com |
Writer's Resources |
Get on the AALBC.com |
Reviews |
Events |
Send us Feedback |
Privacy Policy |
Buy Any Book]
|
|
|
|||||||
Copyright © 1997-2009 AALBC.com, LLC - http://aalbc.com