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For Henry and his 8-year-old son, Junior, days are measured in dollars and cents. Evicted from their trailer, they now call Henry's F-250 home. Today is Junior's birthday; tomorrow Henry has a job interview. To celebrate, they have a fast food dinner and spend the night at a cheap motel. But when Henry has a altercation and in the parking lot and Junior falls ill with a fever, can they make it through to the day to come? -- adapted from back cover and perusal of book

""There's no way you can do this reentry thing," Orlando Lucero tells himself after getting out of prison. He has spent most of his life institutionalized, first in an orphanage and then in the Denver Youth Authority for smuggling weed. Orlando knows nothing about freedom. What does one do with it? What is it? His brother promised to teach him the carpentry trade, but Orlando quickly discovers Camilo is--like their parents--an addict, robbing and stealing to feed his habit. So he turns to Lila, his prison pen pal who encouraged both his poetry writing and sexual fantasies. Soon he moves in with her and engages in the acts he dreamed about while incarcerated, but living the straight life seems impossible. "Freedom is full of hazards, lots of sharp edges, and they cut me at every turn." As he is sucked back into a life of crime, he can't help but think going back to prison would be a relief. Renowned poet Jimmy Santiago Baca explores in lyrical prose one young man's attempts to break free from the cycle of addiction, violence and abuse that contributed to his imprisonment and impede his search for happiness and a productive life. In a society that considers him a criminal because of his brown skin, and where those in authority--including a parade of priests when he was just a boy--take advantage of him, Orlando must learn to believe in himself against all the odds, in spite of the institutionalized racism he has endured since boyhood."-- Provided by publisher

Bill Reed manages a wildlife sanctuary in rural Idaho, caring for injured animals-raptors, a wolf, and his beloved bear, Majer, among them-that are unable to survive in the wild. Seemingly rid of his troubled past, Bill hopes to marry the local veterinarian and live a quiet life together, the promise of which is threatened when a childhood friend is released from prison. Suddenly forced to confront the secrets of his criminal youth, Bill battles fiercely to preserve the shelter that protects these wounded animals and to keep hidden his turbulent, even dangerous, history. Alternating between past and present, Christian Kiefer contrasts the wreckage of Bill's crime-ridden years in Reno, Nevada, with the elusive promise of a peaceful future. In finely sculpted prose imaginatively at odds with the harsh, volatile world Kiefer evokes, The Animals builds powerfully toward the revelation of Bill's defining betrayal-and the drastic lengths Bill goes to in order to escape the consequences.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

John Grisham, delivers another legal thriller of unparalled suspense. With fourteen years left on a twenty-year sentence, notorious Washington power broker, Joel Blackman, receives a surprise pardon from a lame-duck president. He is smuggled out of the country on a military cargo plane, given a new identity, and tucked away in a small town in Italy. But Blackman has serious enemies from his past. As the CIA watches him closely, the question is not whether he will be killed, but rather who will kill him first.

"Cold Storage, Alaska, is a remote fishing outpost where salmonberries sparkle in the morning frost and where you just might catch a King Salmon if you're zen enough to wait for it. Settled in 1935 by Norse fishermen who liked to skinny dip in its natural hot springs, the town enjoyed prosperity in the mid-20th Century, at the height of the frozen fish boom. But now the cold storage plant is all but abandoned and the population is shrinking every day. Clive "The Milkman" McCahon returns to his tiny Alaska hometown after a 7-year jail stint for dealing coke. He has a lot to make up to his younger brother, Miles, who has dutifully been taking care of their ailing mother--and, really, all of Cold Storage--Miles is a Physician's Assistant and the closest thing to a doctor this side of Sitka. But Clive doesn't realize the trouble he's bringing home. He's reformed now, and his dream is to open a bar-slash-church (a Cold Storage ordinance requires there to be as many churches in town as there are bars). Clive's vengeful old business partner is hot on his heels, a stick-in-the-mud State Trooper is dying to bust Clive for narcotics, and, to complicate everything, Clive might be going insane--lately, he's been hearing animals talking to him. Will his arrival in Cold Storage be a breath of fresh air for the sleepy, depopulated town? Or will Clive's arrival turn the whole place upside-down?"-- Provided by publisher.

The first time Ravi Shankar was arrested, he spoke out against racist policing on National Public Radio and successfully sued the city of New York. The second time, he was incarcerated when his promotion to full professor was finalized. During his ninety-day pretrial confinement at the Hartford Correctional Center--a level 4, high-security urban jail in Connecticut--he met men who shared harrowing and heart-felt stories. The experience taught him about the persistence of structural racism, the limitations of mass media, and the pervasive traumas of twenty-first-century daily life. Shankar's bold and complex self-portrait--and portrait of America--challenges us to rethink our complicity in the criminal justice system and mental health policies that perpetuate inequity and harm. Correctional dives into the inner workings of his mind and heart, framing his unexpected encounters with law and order through the lenses of race, class, privilege, and his bicultural upbringing as the first and only son of South Indian immigrants. Vignettes from his early life set the scene for his spectacular fall and subsequent struggle to come to terms with his own demons. Many of them, it turns out, are also our own.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

His career derailed by the vengeful billionaire Curtlee family for his part in convicting one of their number for murder, former homicide detective Abe Glitsky learns that the killer has won a retrial at the same time a star witness has been murdered.

"Fresh from prison, young Bento stumbles into a job at a quirky collection agency, joining an unconventional crew that works out of a former warehouse where bats and pigeons roost in the rafters. Collectors scavenge among hammered victims of an economy that never seems to work for them. Debtors include patsies, cheats, liars, bewildered shopaholics, and furiously dedicated deadbeats. All bought the American dream but couldn't pay the price. "Bill collectors are like priests," says a crew member. "You can tell me anything." Battered "schmoes" do just that, sharing secrets with collector-confessors who in some cases only recently exited the list of shame themselves. A blue-skinned survivalist cop dreams of acceptance as he schemes to steal drug money; a young woman with a masters in library science waves to drivers from inside a chicken costume; a world-renowned author is picked clean by an ex-girlfriend; an Air Force navigator loses control as he transports corpses of the fallen back to the States; and lovers find each other at the other end of a collection call. Meanwhile Bento struggles to elude a cell that's awaited him all along. As their paths intersects, characters' lives throb with humor, suspense, and the intensity that flows from human beings under relentless pressure" -- provided by publisher.

After more than twenty years in prison, a trans woman newly released on parole spends a whirlwind Fourth of July weekend in Brooklyn trying to reconcile with the son she left behind and to reunite with a family reluctant to accept her true identity. Carlotta Mercedes has been misunderstood her entire life. When she was pulled into a robbery gone wrong, she still went by the name she'd grown up with in Fort Greene, Brooklyn - before it gentrified. But not long after her conviction, she took the name Carlotta and began to live as a woman, an embrace of selfhood that prison authorities rejected, keeping Carlotta trapped in an all-male cell block, abused by both inmates and guards, and often placed in solitary. But in her fifth appearance before the parole board, Carlotta is at last granted conditional freedom and given a bus ticket back to a New York City that has changed as much in the intervening decades as she herself has changed to those who knew her before she was sent away. Can she reconcile with the son she left behind and reunite with a family reluctant to accept her as Carlotta, all while complying with near-impossible parole restrictions and doing everything in her power to stay out of jail? Written with the same mischievous verve and astonishing freshness in Delicious Foods, which dazzled critics and listeners alike, Didn't Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta sweeps the listener through seemingly every street of Brooklyn in a whirlwind Fourth of July weekend. The novel sings with brio and ambition, offering a fantastically entertaining story and a cast of unforgettable characters even as it challenges us to confront the glaring injustices of a prison system that continues to punish people even after they've been freed

After more than twenty years in prison, a trans woman newly released on parole spends a whirlwind Fourth of July weekend in Brooklyn trying to reconcile with the son she left behind and to reunite with a family reluctant to accept her true identity. Carlotta Mercedes has been misunderstood her entire life. When she was pulled into a robbery gone wrong, she still went by the name she'd grown up with in Fort Greene, Brooklyn - before it gentrified. But not long after her conviction, she took the name Carlotta and began to live as a woman, an embrace of selfhood that prison authorities rejected, keeping Carlotta trapped in an all-male cell block, abused by both inmates and guards, and often placed in solitary. But in her fifth appearance before the parole board, Carlotta is at last granted conditional freedom and given a bus ticket back to a New York City that has changed as much in the intervening decades as she herself has changed to those who knew her before she was sent away. Can she reconcile with the son she left behind and reunite with a family reluctant to accept her as Carlotta, all while complying with near-impossible parole restrictions and doing everything in her power to stay out of jail? Written with the same mischievous verve and astonishing freshness in Delicious Foods, which dazzled critics and listeners alike, Didn't Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta sweeps the listener through seemingly every street of Brooklyn in a whirlwind Fourth of July weekend. The novel sings with brio and ambition, offering a fantastically entertaining story and a cast of unforgettable characters even as it challenges us to confront the glaring injustices of a prison system that continues to punish people even after they've been freed

Philip Dixon is down on his luck. A hair-raising escape from a lucrative but botched bank robbery lands him gushing blood and on the verge of collapse in a quaint college town in New Hampshire. How can he find a place to hide out in this innocent setting? But peering into the window of the nearest house, he sees a glimmer of hope: a man in his mid-thirties, obviously some kind of academic, is rolling around on the living-room floor with an attractive high-school student...And so Professor Elias White is blackmailed into harbouring a dangerous fugitive, as Dixon - with a cool quarter-million in his bag and dreams of Canada in his head - gets ready for the last phase of his escape. But the last phase is always the hardest...FBI agent Denise Lupo is on his trail, and she's better at her job than her superiors think. As for Elias White, his surprising transition from respected academic to willing accomplice poses a ruthless threat that Dixon would be foolish to underestimate...
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

The new Burke novel from the critically acclaimed and controversial author of Sacrifice and Shella. Vachss infuses the modern crime novel with salient reality and a different kind of hero--an outcast PI who delivers mean yet measured justice to those who prey on and profit from the lives of children.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

"Set in the blighted industrial landscape of the Los Angeles basin, Dreamland Court is a love story. Johnny Dalton, just released from prison, returns home to find his wife Jackie, the mother of his two small children, passionately involved with one of his friends. Determind to do everything in his power to win her back, Johnny blunders his way through one criminal enterprise after another. When the cops pick him up for being the only adult present at a wild teenage party, he’s sent back to jail. The strange thing is, Jackie finds Johnny's antics exciting, even irresistible. Reminiscent of the pathos in Hubert Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn, and the comedy of John Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, Dale Herd focuses his astute gaze on lives that are ordinarily invisible, while turning the conventional love story on its head."-- Back cover

"An uneasiness festers upon the city streets, threatening the peace and safety of law abiding citizens. A war is escalating, and it seems as though the good and righteous are being crushed beneath the unholy weight of evil's onslaught. Organized crime is spreading in an unchecked reign of terror. Until a mysterious agent of retribution rises up from the shadows to challenge the villains. A lone figure, clad in a slouch hat and clothes seemingly stitched from the blackest shadows, masked in the guise of a skull-faced death--a Grim Death--emerges with guns blazing. With him, a wronged ex-con clad in the striped costume of his misfortune--Bill the Electrocuted Criminal. In this beautifully illustrated 1930s Pulp-style novel, two dark new characters by New York Times bestselling author and comic book writer Tom Sniegoski and New York Times bestselling, award-winning creator of Hellboy Mike Mignola who also worked on the Hellboy movies with Guillermo del Toro, take to the street to fight the growing infection of organized crime. Grim Death and Bill the Electrocuted Criminal are not your average heroes, but they want justice"-- Provided by publisher.

The author relates how, as a young adult, he became a drug user and smuggler, was arrested, did time in prison, and eventually got out and went to college, all the while hoping to become a writer.

"In the early 1970s, in Stovall, Texas, seventeen-year-old Earl--a loner, dreamer, lover of music and words--meets Tina, the new girl in town. Tina convinces Earl to drive her to see her mother in Austin, where Earl and Tina are quickly separated. Two days later, Earl is being questioned by the police about Tina's disappearance and the blood in the trunk of his car. But Earl can't remember what happened in Austin, and with little financial support from his working-class family, he is sentenced for a crime he did not commit. Forty years later, Earl is released into a world he can barely navigate. Settling in a small town on the Oregon coast, he attempts to establish a sense of freedom from both bars and razor wire and the emotional toll of incarceration. But just as Earl finds the rhythm he's always sought, his past returns to endanger the new life he's built"--Book jacket flap
"The story of Earl, a 17-year-old boy who goes to prison for a crime he didn't commit"-- Provided by publisher

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A TODAY Show Read with Jenna Book Club Pick A New York Times Notable Book, and Chosen by Oprah Daily, Time, NPR, The Washington Post and Barack Obama as a Best Book of the Year "Wise and wildly entertaining . . . permeated with light, wit, youth." -The New York Times Book Review "A classic that we will read for years to come." -Jenna Bush Hager, Read with Jenna book club "A real joyride . . . elegantly constructed and compulsively readable." - NPR The bestselling author of A Gentleman in Moscow and Rules of Civility and master of absorbing, sophisticated fiction returns with a stylish and propulsive novel set in 1950s America In June, 1954, eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is driven home to Nebraska by the warden of the juvenile work farm where he has just served fifteen months for involuntary manslaughter. His mother long gone, his father recently deceased, and the family farm foreclosed upon by the bank, Emmett's intention is to pick up his eight-year-old brother, Billy, and head to California where they can start their lives anew. But when the warden drives away, Emmett discovers that two friends from the work farm have hidden themselves in the trunk of the warden's car. Together, they have hatched an altogether different plan for Emmett's future, one that will take them all on a fateful journey in the opposite direction-to the City of New York. Spanning just ten days and told from multiple points of view, Towles's third novel will satisfy fans of his multi-layered literary styling while providing them an array of new and richly imagined settings, characters, and themes.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

"Michael Hudson spends the long days in prison devouring books given to him by the prison's librarian, a young woman named Anna who develops a soft spot for her best student. Anna keeps passing Michael books until one day he disappears, suddenly released after a private detective manipulated a witness in Michael's trial. Outside, Michael encounters a Washington, D.C. that has changed a lot during his time locked up. Once shady storefronts are now trendy beer gardens and flower shops. But what hasn't changed is the hard choice between the temptation of crime and doing what's right. Trying to balance his new job, his love of reading, and the debt he owes to the man who got him released, Michael struggles to figure out his place in this new world before he loses control."-- Dust jacket.

• Mao II (1991)
• Underworld (1997)
• Chronology
• Note on the texts
• Notes.

This second volume in the Library of America DeLillo edition collects two extraordinary novels he published in the 1990s, the peak of his career. In the PEN/Faulkner Award-winning Mao II (1991), the celebrated novelist Bill Gray has withdrawn into seclusion, his everyday affairs managed by a pair of assistants. And yet within the protective solitude he has built for himself he still finds himself struggling--with pills and with a novel he can't manage to complete. A visit from a Swedish photographer who specializes in author portraits spurs him to shake off his world-weariness, and soon the reclusive writer is embarked on an unlikely journey to help broker the release of a poet held hostage by terrorists in Beirut. Mao II, writes the critic Sven Birkerts, is "DeLillo's strongest statement yet about the crisis of crises. Namely, that we are living in the last violet twilight of the individual, and that 'the future belongs to crowds.'" Underworld (1997), DeLillo's magnum opus and a book that ranks among the greatest of twentieth-century novels, is a sprawling, ambitious, and moving panorama of the postwar American experience. It begins with a tour de force re-imagination of one of the great moments in sports: the decisive pennant game between the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers at the Polo Grounds in 1951, culminating in the now legendary "shot heard 'round the world" home run by Bobby Thomson. In DeLillo's hands the excitement of the game is juxtaposed with something far more momentous, the announcement of the Soviets' first atomic test--a coincidence that initiates a kaleidoscopic saga that is woven across more than four decades, shuttling back and forth through time and mixing fictional characters with historical figures such as Lenny Bruce and J. Edgar Hoover. The novel is at once a profound meditation on our contemporary condition and a deeply personal book for its author, drawing poignantly on his memories of growing up in the Bronx. "All of DeLillo is in Underworld," writes Harold Bloom. "DeLillo's sense of America, in the second half of the twentieth century, is achieved perfectly." Here is the ultimate gift for DeLillo fans and perfect introduction for readers interested in discovering or rediscovering a great American writer.

"Peter Heller, the celebrated author of the breakout best-seller The Dog Stars, returns with an achingly beautiful, wildly suspenseful second novel about an artist trying to outrun his past. Years ago, a well-known expressionist painter named Jim Stegner shot a man in a bar. The man lived, Jim served his time, and he has learned to live with the dark impulses that sometimes overtake him. Jim enjoys a quiet life in the valleys of Colorado. He works with a lovely model, he doesn't drink, he goes fly fishing in the evenings. His paintings fetch excellent prices at a posh gallery in Santa Fe. He is--if he can admit it--almost happy. One day, driving down a dirt road, Jim sees a man beating a small horse. Jim leaps out of the truck, tackles the man, and bloodies his nose. The man is Dell, a cruel hunting outfitter notorious among locals. Jim cannot shake his rage over the little horse. The next night, under a full moon, telling himself he is just going night fishing, he returns to the creek where Dell has his camp and kills him. As Jim tries to come to terms with what he has done, he must evade the police, navigate his own conscience, and escape the members of Dell's clan set on revenge. And he paints the whole time; trying to make sense of his actions. Traveling from the rough adobe cottages and rivers of Colorado to the bright streets and galleries of Santa Fe, aching with grief and transcendent with beauty, The Painter is a story about art and love and violence, and using the remnants of hardship to create a rich life"-- Provided by publisher.
"Peter Heller, the celebrated author of the breakout best seller The Dog Stars, returns with an achingly beautiful, wildly suspenseful second novel about an artist trying to outrun his past"-- Provided by publisher.