Piri Thomas: 4 books

Thirty years ago Piri Thomas made literary history with this lacerating, lyrical memoir of his coming of age on the streets of Spanish Harlem. Here was the testament of a born outsider: a Puerto Rican in English-speaking America; a dark-skinned morenito in a family that refused to acknowledge its African...

Many people write about the ghetto. Piri Thomas lived there. In this book, the author of Down These Mean Streets tells what he found when he returned from a seven year prison term. Friends dying on heroin, or getting rich selling it. Jobs he couldn’t get, not because he lacked training or ability,...

In these eight stories Piri Thomas takes us with him into El Barrio—Puerto Rico in New York City—and recreates the scenes he knows so well from his own childhood. He leads us through streets teaming with life, up crumbling front stoops, down dark hallways, into crowded rooms, and into the hearts...

Seven 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...