Urban Memoirs

Drawing on their personal history as a former urban equestrian, Black queer person, and child of Jamaican and Filipino immigrants, essayist and art critic Bitter Kalli contends the horse should be regarded as a critical source of power and identity in Black life. In a series of astute essays, Kalli explores the work of Black artists and influencers from Beyoncé to filmmakers Tiona Nekkia-McClodden and Jeymes Samuel and explores their own life-long relationship to equines.

During the Roaring Twenties, two of the most revered and influential men in American business proposed to transform one of the country’s poorest regions into a dream technological metropolis, a shining paradise of small farms, giant factories, and sparkling laboratories. Henry Ford and Thomas Edison’s “Detroit of the South” would be 10 times the size of Manhattan, powered by renewable energy, and free of air pollution. And it would reshape American society.

On March 13, 1964, Kitty Genovese was brutally beaten and murdered in the street near her apartment, in full view of more than three dozen friends and neighbors - and no one did a thing to stop it. More than thirty-five years after its first publication, Thirty-Eight Witnesses, the true account of what transpired that night in Queens, New York, continues to disturb us. We would like to think that we would step in and do what we could to stop the carnage.

From its beginnings in the 1890s, Miami Beach has been a place made by visionaries and hustlers. During Prohibition, Al Capone had to muscle into its bootlegging and gambling businesses. After December 1941, when the Beach was the training ground for half a million army recruits, even the war couldn't stop the party. After a short postwar boom, the city's luck gave out. But in 1981, 125,000 Cubans arrived by the boatload.

The father that the brothers shared was as elusive a figure for George as he had been for Barack Obama; he died when George was six months old and George was raised by his mother and stepfather. But after his mother and stepfather separated, he drifted into gangs and petty crime. Arrested for robbery, restless, willful, and troubled, he lost himself in Nairobi's vast Mathare ghetto. After being framed for an armed robbery he did not commit and spending time in jail, he represented himself at trial and won the case.

The story of one of the most controversial figures in all of hip-hop history, Dummy Boy tells the tale of Tekashi 6ix9ine and his meteoric rise to fame. In tracing Danny "Tekashi 6ix9ine" Hernandez's life from Bushwick to the heights of the rap scene, Complex reporter Shawn Setaro illuminates the story of the young rapper who forged an alliance with a notorious street gang to bolster his image and boost his internet clout.

Too dark for science and too evil for theology, but some secrets refuse to stay hidden. Postgraduate student Harry Chesterton uncovers a trail of dark science that leads to the old monastery above the Welsh town of Aberystwyth. With bodies beneath the cafe, residents oozing puss from puncture marks on their necks, and the disappearance of the University Chaplain, Chesterton's research into post-mortem consciousness is about to leap off the page.

Prison buddies Billy Good and Jackie Walker made time pulling small jobs here and there. Not a bad living if you liked scraping by. The thing to worry about was the next fix. Nothing else mattered. When Billy and Jackie fell in with Kenyatta, a ghetto lord ready to take back the streets, they thought they'd hit the big time. Dealing with drug pushers and crooked cops in the name of justice sure felt good, but in a world where "kindness was the sweetest con of all", every bullet fired echoed with the sound of payback.

Mark Falanga is a slick urban dweller, at the top of his game professionally, with a gorgeous corporate executive wife and a hip coterie in the coolest neighborhood in the city. But when baby makes three, Mark and his family enter the twilight zone called the suburbs, where public schools are good, many wives stay home, and children ride their tricycles in the driveway.

Mark Falanga is a slick urban dweller, at the top of his game professionally, with a gorgeous corporate executive wife and a hip coterie in the coolest neighborhood in the city. But when baby makes three, Mark and his family enter the twilight zone called the suburbs, where public schools are good, many wives stay home, and children ride their tricycles in the driveway.

Un ensayo muy bien documentado sobre una realidad oscura de Galicia.

Survival Math is both a personal reckoning and a vital addition to the national conversation about race. Mitchell explores the Portland of his childhood, tracing the ways in which his family managed their lives in and around drugs, prostitution, gangs, and imprisonment as members of a tiny black population in one of the country’s whitest cities. He discusses sex work and serial killers, gangs and guns, near-death experiences, composite fathers, the concept of “hustle,” and the destructive power of drugs and addiction on family.

Dirty White Boy is a vivid mosaic of modern London, caught between the ghosts of the past and the uncertainties of the future. With an unforgettable cast of characters ranging from Chico the camp queen to Pam the Fag Lady (with guest spots by stars like Kathy Griffin and Graham Norton), these compulsively listenable true tales offer a wry panorama of Soho's rich and often raucous subcultures.

Told with equal parts raw honesty and unbridled compassion, All Day recounts a year in Liza Jessie Peterson's classroom at Island Academy, the high school for inmates detained at New York City's Rikers Island. A poet and an actress who had done occasional workshops at the correctional facility, Peterson was ill prepared for a full-time stint teaching in the GED program for the incarcerated youths.

Coca, farlopa, perico, merca, Fariña. Nunca Galicia comercializó un producto con tanto éxito. Aunque ahora parezca una pesadilla lejana, en los años 90 el 80 por ciento de la cocaína desembarcaba en Europa por las costas gallegas. A través de testimonios directos de capos, pilotos de planeadoras, arrepentidos, jueces, policías, periodistas y madres de toxicómanos, Nacho Carretero retrata con minuciosidad este paisaje criminal. Fariña incluye, además, un repaso inédito por los clanes que siguen operando hoy en día.

Burned-out after years of doing development work around the world, William Powers spent a season in a 12-foot-by-12-foot cabin off the grid in North Carolina, as recounted in his award-winning memoir Twelve by Twelve. Could he live a similarly minimalist life in the heart of New York City? To find out, Powers and his wife jettisoned 80 percent of their stuff, left their 2,000-square-foot Queens townhouse, and moved into a 350-square-foot "micro-apartment" in Greenwich Village.

Doctor Dread has committed his life to producing reggae music and releasing it on his label, RAS Records. He has become one of the world's foremost reggae producers and has worked with almost all the genre's icons: Bunny Wailer, Black Uhuru, Ziggy and Damian Marley, Gregory Isaacs, and others. This audiobook, full of behind-the-scenes stories, has shocking chapters that reveal aspects of reggae never before explored.

Dr. Sampson Davis looks at the health-care crisis in the inner city from a rare perspective: as a doctor who works on the front line of emergency medical care in the poor urban neighborhood where he grew up. He also offers practical advice for those living in such communities, where conditions like asthma, heart disease, strokes, obesity, and AIDS are disproportionately endemic. As someone who has struggled with many of the issues troubling his patients, Dr. Davis is able to write with empathy.

Gil was just another college student when his father died and left him an incredible inheritance. Destined to be both the hero of Varay and the heir to its crown, Gil stepped through the magical doorway where he received a cram course in the hazards of the Varayan buffer zone. But now he would need all his skill, luck and wizard and warrior allies to face a new menace.

Gil Tyner has plans for the future: He’s going to be a computer programmer in the bustling technology Mecca of Silicon Valley. And as his 21st birthday approaches, he’s on the cusp of realizing his goals. But fate has other plans. A note from his mother on his birthday propels Gil into The Buffer Zone, seven magical kingdoms that stand between our world and the realm of the immortal elves. Gil’s about to learn that plans can change. When destiny calls, he’ll discover that the life he’d imagined and the life he’ll lead will be very different.