Saul Diskins extraordinary memoir is rich with unique and wonderful intimacythe intimacy of twinship. For me this made that closest of bonds come alive in a way no other book Ive read has succeeded in doing. Diskin makes one feel like a twin, see the world through a twins eyes, suffer with him in a way that is at times almost unbearably close and poignant. One becomes immersed in the life and death struggle. The medical detail is wonderfully well-done, as are all the relationships. The pec...

The book has two related themes. The first is a story of an improbable friendship between a rural, semi-literate, violent, heroin addicted Chicano and a Brooklyn bred Jew, who bonded almost immediately. Life drew them apart for almost half a century and when the friendship resumed, both Santana and Saul realized, to their satisfaction, that their feelings for the other had remained strong.In the intervening years, however, their circumstances had changed radically. Santana, after s...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERWith her energies focused on a baffling, vicious gang slaying and her personal life in shambles, Hollywood homicide detective Petra Connor has a full plate. The last thing she needs is a whiz-kid grad student claiming to have stumbled upon a bizarre connection between several unsolved murders.“An elaborate, tangled web . . . With unsuspected turns at every chapter break . . . this addictive tale . . . is as intricat...

**In the spirit of Oliver Sacks and the inspiration for the NBC drama New Amsterdam, this memoir from a Medical Director of Bellevue Hospital looks poignantly at patients' lives, highlighting the complex mind-body connection."As intensely involving as any scripted for a television medical drama." —The New York Daily News**Twelve Patients shows the plights of twelve very different patients—from dignitaries at the nearby UN, to supermax prisoners at...

**This important and timely book from a Pulitzer Prize finalist follows the brutal journey a group of men take to cross the Mexican border."The single most compelling, lucid, and lyrical contemporary account of the absurdity of U.S. border policy" —The Atlantic**In May 2001, a group of men attempted to cross the Mexican border into the desert of southern Arizona, through the deadliest region of the continent, the "Devil's Highway." Three years later, Luis Alberto U...

From the beloved and award-winning author Junot Díaz, a spellbinding saga of a family’s journey through the New World.A coming-of-age story of unparalleled power, Drown introduced the world to Junot Díaz's exhilarating talents. It also introduced an unforgettable narrator— Yunior, the haunted, brilliant young man who tracks his family’s precarious journey from the barrios of Santo Domingo to the tenements of industrial New Jersey, and their epic passage fr...

The award-winning memoir of life in an LA street gang from the acclaimed Chicano author and former Los Angeles Poet Laureate: "Fierce, and fearless" ( The New York Times).Luis J. Rodríguez joined his first gang at age eleven. As a teenager, he witnessed the rise of some of the most notorious cliques in Southern California. He grew up knowing only a life of violence—one that revolved around drugs, gang wars, and police brutality. But unlike most of those ar...

As a hurricane bears down on Miami, a crime reporter confronts the mystery of her own father's past: "[An] irresistible series" ( Kirkus Reviews).When Miami crime reporter Britt Montero reports a missing teenager, she discovers that the case may be related to a string of unsolved disappearances. As Britt delves into the baffling case, an old mystery opens new wounds: she unexpectedly meets two men who knew her deceased father—who was executed long ago in a...

Luis Alberto Urrea's Across the Wire offers a compelling and unprecedented look at what life is like for those refugees living on the Mexican side of the border—a world that is only some twenty miles from San Diego, but that few have seen. Urrea gives us a compassionate and candid account of his work as a member and "official translator" of a crew of relief workers that provided aid to the many refugees hidden just behind the flashy tourist spots of Tijuana. His account of the str...

By the Lake of Sleeping Children explores the post-NAFTA and Proposition 187 border purgatory of garbage pickers and dump dwellers, gawking tourists,and relief workers, fearsome coyotes and their desperate clientele. In sixteen indelible portraits, Urrea illuminates the horrors and the simple joys of people trapped between the two worlds of Mexico and the United States - and ignored by both. The result is a startling and memorable work of first-person reportage.

"It is a great beauty of a book, and I am so proud of you for standing with and for the disappeared. A sister, a lover, a witness."--Alice WalkerMary is nineteen and living alone in Albuquerque. Adrift in the wake of her mother's death, she longs for something meaningful to take her over. Then José Luis enters her life. A refugee from El Salvador and its bloody civil war, José has been smuggled to the United States as part of the sanctuary movement.Mary cannot help b...

This acclaimed novel by the Pulitzer Prize–finalist is "at once a story about a boy growing up in two cultures, a love story, and a mystery" ( The Boston Globe).Winner of the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction, The Long Night of White Chickens announced Francisco Goldman's arrival as a major literary talent. It is both a suspenseful mystery and a tale of two worlds that plumbs the darkest depths of the relationship between the United States and Gu...