Richard Price

This is a book which regards poetry as a meeting point and creator of overlapping communities of writers, readers, and audiences. While essays here look closely at individual poets in the lyric tradition, including Edward Thomas, Denise Riley, and Edwin Morgan, the author also elucidates the networks of energy and inspiration which poetry and the artist's book catalyse.

Kenny Becker just dumped his girlfriend-the reasons are a little complex. Young and newly unemployed, his main assets at the moment are six-pack abs and a healthy libido-he's ready to get out, find a little action, and maybe find himself too. But, New York is no place for the lonely, and with one meaningless sexual encounter after another, Kenny begins to wonder if the singles scene is not itself a complete con job, with his heart and his future at...

A teenage gang comes of age in the 1960s Bronx. Written when the author was twenty-four, this story was the basis for a major feature film.

Eighteen-year-old Stony De Coco has to make a choice: either join his father in the tightly knit world of New York's construction unions or take off and find his own path. But Stony's family is not about to make that choice easy. As he struggles to protect his little brother, Albert, from their dangerously unbalanced mother, and to postpone the difficult adult responsibilities that await him, he finds hope in a job working with children at a hospital-a...

For more than four centuries, communities of maroons (men and women who escaped slavery) dotted the fringes of plantation America, from Brazil through the Caribbean to the United States. Today their descendants still form semi-independent enclaves-in Jamaica, Brazil, Colombia, Belize, Suriname, Guyane, and elsewhere-remaining proud of their maroon origins and, in some cases, faithful to unique cultural traditions forged during the earliest days of...

Relates an emotionally charged story of a white woman who claims her son has been kidnapped and a black detective who suspects her of infanticide.

When John Gabriel Stedman's Narrative of Five Years Expedition was first published in 1796-a bowdlerized edition "full of lies and nonsense"-Stedman claimed to have burned two thousand copies. It nevertheless became an immediate popular success. A first-hand account of an eighteenth-century slave society, including graphic accounts of the worlds of both masters and slaves, it also contained vivid descriptions of exotic plants and animals, of military...

Freedomland is a highly charged and gritty mystery of a car hijacking, a missing child and a neighborhood torn asunder, starring Samuel L. Jackson and Julianne Moore.