"Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork and over 150 interviews with gang-affiliated youth in the "Taylor Park" neighborhood on Chicago's South Side, Ballad of the Bullet reveals that those coming of age in America's poorest neighborhoods are developing new, creative, and online strategies for making ends meet. Dislocated by the erosion of the crack economy and the splintering of corporatized gangs, these young people exploit the unique affordances of digital social media to capitalize on an emerging online market for urban violence (or, more accurately, a market for the representation of urban violence). In the past, violence functioned primarily as a means of social control, allowing urban youth to compete in illegal street markets and defend the social statuses otherwise denied to them by mainstream society. Today, with the rise of platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter, violence has become a premier cultural commodity in and of itself. By amassing millions of clicks, views, and followers, these young people convert their online displays of violence into vital offline resources, including cash, housing, drugs, sex, and, for a very select few, a ticket out of poverty" --

Maria Venegas had been estranged from her father for fourteen years when she finally made the journey back from the US to Mexico to visit him in the old hacienda where both he and she were born. As they begin spending summers and holidays together, herding cattle and fixing barbed-wire fence posts, he starts to share stories with her, tales of a dramatic life filled with both intense love and brutal violence - from the final conversations he had with his own father and his extradition from the US for murder, to his mother's pride after he shot a man for the first time at age twelve. In spare, gripping prose, Venegas traces her own life and her father's through the stories she inherited from him and gradually comes to understand the violent undercurrent that has shaped them both.

Ambition will fuel him. Competition will drive him. But power has its price. It is the morning of the reaping that will kick off the tenth annual Hunger Games. In the Capitol, eighteen-year-old Coriolanus Snow is preparing for his one shot at glory as a mentor in the Games. The once-mighty house of Snow has fallen on hard times, its fate hanging on the slender chance that Coriolanus will be able to outcharm, outwit, and outmaneuver his fellow students to mentor the winning tribute. The odds are against him. He's been given the humiliating assignment of mentoring the female tribute from District 12, the lowest of the low. Their fates are now completely intertwined - every choice Coriolanus makes could lead to favor or failure, triumph or ruin. Inside the arena, it will be a fight to the death. Outside the arena, Coriolanus starts to feel for his doomed tribute . . . and must weigh his need to follow the rules against his desire to survive no matter what it takes.

After he shoots a man, the stakes for gambler Logan Devereaux have never been higher. On trial for his life, he’s offered a shocking alternative form of restitution... marriage to his victim’s pregnant sweetheart!

An award-winning journalist’s dramatic account of a shooting that shook a community to its core, with important implications for the future On the last evening of summer in 2013, five shots rang out in a part of northeast Denver known as the Holly. Long a destination for African American families fleeing the Jim Crow South, the area had become an “invisible city” within a historically white metropolis. While shootings there weren’t uncommon, the identity of the shooter that night came as a shock. Terrance Roberts was a revered anti-gang activist. His attempts to bring peace to his community had won the accolades of both his neighbors and the state’s most important power brokers. Why had he just fired a gun? In The Holly, the award-winning Denver-based journalist Julian Rubinstein reconstructs the events that left a local gang member paralyzed and Roberts facing the possibility of life in prison. Much more than a crime story, The Holly is a multigenerational saga of race and politics that runs from the civil rights movement to Black Lives Matter. With a cast that includes billionaires, elected officials, cops, developers, and street kids, the book explores the porous boundaries between a city’s elites and its most disadvantaged citizens. It also probes the fraught relationships between police, confidential informants, activists, gang members, and ex–gang members as they struggle to put their pasts behind them. In The Holly, we see how well-intentioned efforts to curb violence and improve neighborhoods can go badly awry, and we track the interactions of law enforcement with gang members who conceive of themselves as defenders of a neighborhood. When Roberts goes on trial, the city’s fault lines are fully exposed. In a time of national reckoning over race, policing, and the uses and abuses of power, Rubinstein offers a dramatic and humane illumination of what’s at stake.

“A well-supported critique of therapeutic policing and, by extension, of similar paternalistic efforts to help the poor by hassling them into good behavior.” —Los Angeles Times In his first year working in Los Angeles’s Skid Row, Forrest Stuart was stopped on the street by police fourteen times. Usually for doing little more than standing there. Juliette, a woman he met during that time, has been stopped by police well over one hundred times, arrested upward of sixty times, and has given up more than a year of her life serving week-long jail sentences. Her most common crime? Simply sitting on the sidewalk—an arrestable offense in LA. Why? What purpose did those arrests serve, for society or for Juliette? How did we reach a point where we’ve cut support for our poorest citizens, yet are spending ever more on policing and prisons? That’s the complicated, maddening story that Stuart tells in Down, Out & Under Arrest, a close-up look at the hows and whys of policing poverty in the contemporary United States. What emerges from Stuart’s years of fieldwork—not only with Skid Row residents, but with the police charged with managing them—is a tragedy built on mistakes and misplaced priorities more than on heroes and villains. At a time when distrust between police and the residents of disadvantaged neighborhoods has never been higher, Stuart’s book helps us see where we’ve gone wrong, and what steps we could take to begin to change the lives of our poorest citizens—and ultimately our society itself—for the better.

The New York Times Bestseller Set in the Appalachian wilderness and blending legends and folklore with high suspense, this stellar novel, The Ballad of Frankie Silver, is considered one of McCrumb's crowning achievements. In 1833 Frankie Silver was an eighteen-year-old girl convicted of murder in Burke County, North Carolina. Through a detailed investigation, the local sheriff, and soon all the townsfolk, discover reason to question her guilt---but the wheels of justice were mercilessly unstoppable, and she was hanged. Now, more than a century later, another woman is convicted of murder in the lush hills of Tennessee. Her life is in the hands of Spencer Arrowood, a man who begins to discover that the convictions of these two women have deep and haunting parallels. Although Frankie's fate cannot be changed, there is still time to alter the fate of another innocent woman. In a voice that could only be Sharyn McCrumb's, the worlds of these two murders, these two women, intersect in this densely plotted and lyrical novel—and characters, generations, and history are breathlessly painted against an Appalachian canvas.

"Once upon a Time" Is Timeless Wielding a sword as deftly as an embroidery needle, Mulan is unlike any other girl in China. When the emperor summons a great army, each family must send a male to fight. Tomboyish Mulan is determined to spare her aging father and bring her family honor, so she disguises herself and answers the call. But Mulan never expects to find a friend, let alone a soul mate, in the commander of her division, Prince Jian. For all of Mulan's courage with a bow and arrow, is she brave enough to share her true identity and feelings with Prince Jian?

Alt-Right Gangs provides a timely and necessary discussion of youth-oriented groups within the white power movement. Focusing on how these groups fit into the current research on street gangs, Shannon E. Reid and Matthew Valasik catalog the myths and realities around alt-right gangs and their members; illustrate how they use music, social media, space, and violence; and document the risk factors for joining an alt-right gang, as well as the mechanisms for leaving. By presenting a way to understand the growth, influence, and everyday operations of these groups, Alt-Right Gangs informs students, researchers, law enforcement members, and policy makers on this complex subject. Most significantly, the authors offer an extensively evaluated set of prevention and intervention strategies that can be incorporated into existing anti-gang initiatives. With a clear, coherent point of view, this book offers a contemporary synthesis that will appeal to students and scholars alike.

An American classic becomes a modern adventure. In this retelling of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Tim DeRoche dares to imagine that Huck Finn is alive today. Chased by his vengeful and psychotic father, Pap, Huck escapes down the concrete gash that is the Los Angeles River with his friend Miguel, an illegal immigrant who has been falsely accused of murder. Riding the dangerous waters of a rainstorm, the two fugitives meet a strange cast of Angelenos -- both animal and human -- who live down by the river. And they learn the true value of love and loyalty. The Ballad of Huck and Miguel is not only a thrilling urban adventure, but also an inspired tribute to one of the most beloved novels ever written.