Stuff
Product Details
Washington Square Press, October 1998
Trade Paperback, 208 pages
ISBN-10: 0671014994
ISBN-13: 9780671014995
Description
New York Times bestselling author Walter Mosley introduces an "astonishing character" (Los Angeles Times Book Review) in this acclaimed collection of entwined tales. Meet Socrates Fortlow, a tough ex-con seeking truth and redemption in South Central Los Angeles -- and finding the miracle of survival.
"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 huge, rock-breaking hands. Now, he has come home to a new kind of prison: two battered rooms in an abandoned building in Watts. Working for the Bounty supermarket, and moving perilously close to invisibility, it is Socrates who throws a lifeline to a drowning man: young Darryl, whose shaky path is already bloodstained and fearsome. In a place of violence and hopelessness, Socrates offers up his own battle-scarred wisdom that can turn the world around.
Elle Mournful, insightful, and mystical. It is also Mosley's best work of fiction.
Denver Post A wonderful book...[with] characters who seem as real as the reader.
San Francisco Chronicle Mosley has constructed a perfect Socrates for millennium's end
-- a principled man who finds that the highest meaning of life can be attained through self-knowledge, and who convinces others of the power and value of looking within.
Booklist Powerful...hard-hitting, unrelenting, poignant short fiction.
Sven Birkerts The New York Times Book Review Mosley's style suits his subject perfectly. The prose is sand-papery, the sentence rhythms often rough and jabbing. But then -- sudden surprise
-- we come upon moments of undefended lyricism.
Publishers Weekly Unveiling a new, bigger-than-life urban hero...Mosley...confer[s] 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...A maverick protagonist.
Playboy Tough but touching stories.
Amazon.com Gritty and lyrical, the interlinked stories are stamped with Mosley's unique brand of street-smart comedy.
Sonoma County Independent An insistently probing, philosophical gem...set in a world where standard notions of right and wrong have been blown to hell.
The Los Angeles Times Book Review Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned is the work of a writer unafraid of pushing forward his own notions of responsibility and entitlement.
Suite101.com, May 12, 2009
...better. So why does it hurt so much? The Right Mistake: The Further Philosophical Investigations of Socrates Fortlow Walter Mosley Published by BasicCivitas, 2008 ISBN 978-0-465-00525-3 Socrates Fortlow spent twenty-seven years locked up in ...
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