Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
"Mournful, insightful, and mystical...Mosley's best work of fiction." —Elle
New York Times bestselling author Walter Mosley introduces us to Socrates Fortlow, an "astonishing character" (Los Angeles Times Book Review) in this acclaimed collection of linked stories.
"I either committed a crime or had a crime done to me every day I was in jail. Once you go to prison you belong there."
Socrates Fortlow has done his time: twenty-seven years for murder and rape, acts forged by his own two rock-breaking hands. Now, he has come home to a new kind of prison: two battered rooms in an abandoned building in Watts. Working a dead-end job at the supermarket and moving perilously close to invisibility, Socrates seeks inner truth and redemption amid the violence and hopelessness of South Central Los Angeles. In fourteen intertwining tales, Socrates grapples with situations that are never easy as he attempts to hold on to a job and offer a lifeline to a young man on his same bloodstained path. In Socrates's battle-scarred wisdom, there is hope of turning the world around in this "powerful, hard-hitting, unrelenting, poignant short fiction" (Booklist).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Unveiling a new, bigger-than-life urban hero and a new series set in an updated version of Easy Rawlins's South Central Los Angeles, Mosley seems determined to confer on the mean streets of contemporary L.A. what filmmaker John Ford helped create for the American West: a gun-slinging mythology of street justice and a gritty, elegiac code of honor. Socrates Fortlow, an earthy ex-con with the stoic grandeur of an aging cowboy, who can "lift a forty-gallon trash can brimming with water and walk it a full city block," squats in a two-room apartment in Watts, tending a ramshackle garden and collecting bottles. Haunted by his 27 years in an Indiana prison and the murders he's committed with his own "rock-breaking hands," Socrates finds himself in a series of confrontations with a circle of friends and archetypal strangers (a thief, an adulterer and a Vietnam vet) with whom he frequently holds streetwise Platonic dialogues on ethics, remorse and retribution. He fraternizes with neighbors who, against the odds, have helped his community at the grass roots, like Right Burke, whose irascible wife maintains a rooming house for poor blacks, and Oscar Minette, who runs an independent bookstore. He teaches lessons about remorse and manhood to Daryl, a local teenager, finds a job bagging groceries in a more prosperous neighborhood and reluctantly helps the police catch a local arsonist. Fans of the intricately plotted Easy Rawlins novels may be surprised by the episodic format here, in which the linked stories are presented in short chapters with such didactic titles as "History" and "Double Standard" In creating such a maverick protagonist, Mosley has produced a not-quite novel that reads like a philosophical treatise, memorable less for any character insights or resolution than for its indelible vision of "poor men living on the edge of mayhem." BOMC and QPB selections. FYI: Mosley has written a screenplay for an HBO movie based on the novel.
