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"Down These Mean Streets" by Piri Thomas Vintage Books 1997 340 pages

The Thirtieth-Anniversary Edition. "A linguistic event. Gutter language, Spanish imagery and personal poetics ... mingle into a kind of individual statement that has very much its own sound." -- The New York Times Book Review. In this classic confrontational autobiography--first published in 1967 and firmly in the tradition of Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice and The Autobiography of Malcolm X--Piri Thomas, a man of African and Puerto Rican descent living in Spanish Harlem, powerfully relates how he was lost even within his own family and sought his identity through drugs, street fighting, and armed robbery, nearly becoming yet another statistic by the age of twenty-two. His downward spiral from the barrio to Sing Sing is keenly and wisely described, as is his redemption, one found through suffering, endurance, and desire for understanding. {Click here to read the Prologue from the book.} {Click here to read the Afterword from the book.} {Click here for ordering information.

POR ESTAS CALLES BRAVAS por Piri Tomás 334 pages

En Español al fin Por Estas Calles Bravas es "un acontecimiento literario, con lenguaje de la calle, imágenes de la cultura hispana, y una visión poética, que se funden en una especie de declaración personal que forja su propio estilo". -- The New York Times Book Review Desde su adolescencia en El Barrio hasta la cárcel de Sing Sing, Piri Tomás ofrece un recuento estremecedor que con voz profunda, muestra en cada página cómo aprende a conocerse, a aceptarse y finalmente a tener fe en sí mismo. Después de treinta años de su primera edición, este clásico que describe las condiciones de enajenación y la lucha por sobrevivir de un grupo marginado, se publica por primera vez en español, con nuevas últimas palabras del autor Traducido por Suzanne Dod Tomás {Click here for ordering information.

"7 Long Times" by Piri Thomas Arte Publico Press 197 pages

7 Long Times is the prison memoir of one of America's greatest, most passionate chroniclers of life in dehumanizing prisons and on mean city streets. Wounded and arrested while committing an armed robbery, Thomas begins his long seven years of incarceration first in the prison ward at Bellevue and then in Sing Sing and Great Meadows (Comstock). Thomas' great heart and tough street philosophy face off lyrically with the brutality of the guards, the sterility of steel and cement, the perversity fostered on both sides of the bars by incarceration. Seven Long Times is the critically acclaimed sequel to Thomas' classic of urban and prison literature, Down These Mean Streets. {Click here to read the Prologue from the book.} {Click here for ordering information.