In the early 1900s, the Mafia controls much of Sicily, the government is corrupt, and taxes are exorbitant. As a result of the terrible conditions and the limits of their crops, Tomas and Katerina Tomaso are forced to send their three grown sons and their grandchildren to live in America. It is a heart-breaking split: grandparents forced to say goodbye to grandchildren knowing they will likely never see them again. Parents and sons splitting from each other. Paolo and Gianna, their two young children and the two younger brothers endure a painful farewell to the people, the farm and the life they love. They arrive in Chicago on Christmas Day at the dawning of the Roaring Twenties. The sprawling, dirty, smelly city is not like anything they could have imagined or dreamed. The family moves into a fourth floor apartment in a run-down tenement building in the Little Italy section of town. The streets are run by mobsters, politicians and crooked cops, not much different from their homeland. The family soon learns that they are now in the lower class. The two-century family history of hard work and honesty in the Old Country does not matter here. They endure prejudice in the workplace, in the lack of social services and in the absence of police protection. Jobs were hard to find, especially for Italians and even worse for Sicilians. Poverty and discrimination humble them all. Life was tough, but they learned to be tougher. Slowly, the family overcomes obstacles and adjusts to their new homeland. TThe children grow and become Americans. The family was finally settled and content when a terrible and unforgiveable act of violence - committed against them by their Italian countrymen - struck the family, hard. Paolo and Gianna's dreams and hopes for their future and for their children hang in the balance as they decide on the course of action that will define them as people and determine their futures. Plots and tensions simmer and boil over in a shocking conclusion early one morning on Cambridge Street.

For centuries, street literature was the main cheap reading material of the working classes: broadsides, chapbooks, songsters, prints, engravings, and other forms of print produced specifically to suit their taste and cheap enough for even the poor to buy. Starting in the sixteenth century, but at its chaotic and flamboyant peak in the nineteenth, street literature was on sale everywhere – in urban streets and alleyways, at country fairs and markets, at major sporting events and holiday gatherings, and under the gallows at public executions. For this very reason, it was often despised and denigrated by the educated classes, but remained enduringly popular with the ordinary people. Anything and everything was grist to the printers’ mill, if it would sell. A penny could buy you a celebrity scandal, a report of a gruesome murder, the last dying speech of a condemned criminal, wonder tales, riddles and conundrums, a moral tale of religious danger and redemption, a comic tale of drunken husbands and shrewish wives, a temperance tract or an ode to beer, a satire on dandies, an alphabet or “reed-a-ma-daisy” (reading made easy) to teach your children, an illustrated chapbook of nursery rhymes, or the adventures of Robin Hood and Jack the Giant Killer. Street literature long held its own by catering directly for the ordinary people, at a price they could afford, but, by the end of the Victorian era, it was in terminal decline and was rapidly being replaced by a host of new printed materials in the shape of cheap newspapers and magazines, penny dreadful novels, music hall songbooks, and so on, all aimed squarely at the burgeoning mass market. Fascinating today for the unique light it shines on the lives of the ordinary people of the age, street literature has long been neglected as a historical resource, and this collection of essays is the first general book on the trade for over forty years.

An authoritative and lively account of the development of the genre, by leading experts in the field.

Diverse, vibrant, and challenging as the city itself, this Companion is the definitive guide to LA in literature.

This volume explores the most exciting trends in 21st century US fiction's genres, themes, and concepts.

About youth crime and homelessness in Canada.

This deeply researched collection offers a comprehensive introduction to the eighteenth-century trade in street literature – ballads, chapbooks, and popular prints – in England and Scotland. Offering detailed studies of a selection of the printers, types of publication, and places of publication that constituted the cheap and popular print trade during the period, these essays delve into ballads, slip songs, story books, pictures, and more to push back against neat divisions between low and high culture, or popular and high literature. The breadth and depth of the contributions give a much fuller and more nuanced picture of what was being widely published and read during this period than has previously been available. It will be of great value to scholars and students of eighteenth-century popular culture and literature, print history and the book trade, ballad and folk studies, children’s literature, and social history.

Emphasizing an appreciation for street lit as a way to promote reading and library use, Morris’s book helps library staff establish their “street cred” by giving them the information they need to provide knowledgeable guidance.

Clark explores how real-life women's crimes were handled in the news media of an age before the invention of the newspaper, in ballads, pamphlets, and plays. It discusses those features of contemporary society which particularly influenced early modern crime reporting, such as attitudes to news, the law and women's rights, and ideas about the responsibility of the community for keeping order. It considers the problems of writing about transgressive women for audiences whose ideal woman was chaste, silent, and obedient.

Primarily consists of: Transactions, v. 1, 3, 5-8, 10-14, 17-21, 24-28, 32, 34-35, 38, 42-43; and: Collections, v. 2, 4, 9, 15-16, 22-23, 29-31, 33, 36-37, 39-41; also includes lists of members.