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The award-winning author’s “fearless” debut novel chronicles the life of a legendary Texas outlaw with “a ruthless sensibility . . . spare and tough” (Publishers Weekly). Some called him a Texas hero. Some called him the Devil himself. But on one point they all agreed. While he was alive, John Wesley Hardin was the deadliest man in Texas. A killer at fifteen, in the next few years he became skilled enough with his pistols to back down Wild Bill Hickok in the street. The law finally caught up with him when he was twenty-five. By then, he had killed as many as forty men and been shot so many times that, it was said, he carried a pound of lead in his flesh. In jail he became a scholar...
Often outrageous and always entertaining, the Wolfes are not to be missed. In the newest Wolfe-family adventure from James Carlos Blake, Rudy and Frank Wolfe are engaging in routine miscellaneous business - some legitimate and some less so - for their family when they stumble upon a stash of high-quality pornographic films in a raid. The plot thickens when their Aunt Catalina, the family matriarch aged 115, recognizes her long-lost sister in one of the young performers. Catalina tasks the boys with tracking the girl down, however improbable a connection may be. This proves to be no simple task. Soon, Rudy and Frank find themselves moving away from world of porn and towards the upper echelons of the Sinaloa drug cartel, where the mysterious woman has become a particular favorite of the head narco. For their aunt, the woman, and themselves, Frank and Rudy must find a way to get her out without alerting the cartel. A tropical storm complicates their quest, but their sprawling family may save them from this obstacle, too.
James Rudolph Youngblood, aka Jimmy the Kid, is an enforcer, a "ghost rider" for the Maceo brothers, Rosario and Sam, rulers of "the Free State of Galveston," who are prospering through illicit pleasures in the midst of the Great Depression. Raised on an isolated West Texas ranch that he was forced to flee at age eighteen following the violent breakup of his foster family, Jimmy has found a home and a profession in Galveston -- and a mentor in Rose Maceo. Looming over Jimmy's story like an ancient curse is the specter of his fearsome father. Their ties of blood, evident since Jimmy's boyhood, have been drawn tighter over time. Then a strange and beautiful girl enters his life and a swift and terrifying sequence of events is set in motion. Jimmy must cross the border and go deep into the brutal and merciless country of his ancestors -- where the story's harrowing climax closes a circle of destiny many years in the making.
The award-winning author blends fact and fiction to bring the Mexican Revolution to life in a “harrowing and brutal tale” of its famous leader (Rocky Mountain News). Waged from 1910 to 1920, the Mexican Revolution profoundly transformed Mexican government and culture. And Pancho Villa was its “incarnation and its eagle of a soul”—so says Rodolfo Fierro, the narrator of The Friends of Pancho Villa, an ex-con, train robber, and Villa’s loyal friend. Killers of men and lovers of life, the revolutionaries fought for freedom, for a new Mexico, and for Villa himself. In return, they shared victory and death with their country’s most powerful hero. “Frankly describing the murder, betrayal and deceit that turned a revolution against dictatorship into a civil war,” the Los Angeles Times Book Prize–winning author of The Ways of Wolfe delivers a masterpiece of ferocious loyalty, bloody revolution, and legends that live forever (Publishers Weekly). “One of the greatest chroniclers of the mythical American outlaw life” —Entertainment Weekly “This is not for the faint of heart, but then, neither is revolution.” —Publishers Weekly
From the raw clay of historical fact, James Carlos Blake has sculpted a powerful novel of both a man and an America at war with themselves. Here is the brutally honest story of free-spirit William Anderson, who is pulled into a savage conflict of state against state in the years leading up to the Civil War. When Bill suffers a catastrophic loss, a fury is unleashed in his anguished soul. He becomes the most fearsome guerrilla captain and earns a name that becomes whispered with reverence and terror: "Bloody Bill."
Hailed as "one of the greatest chroniclers of the mythical American outlaw life" (Entertainment Weekly), James Carlos Blake turns to the blazing story of Stanley Ketchel, the legendary ragtime-era middleweight boxing champion and daring rakehell, whose brief and meteoric life burned with violence and tragedy in and out of the ring. The Killings of Stanley Ketchel is a sweeping and powerful literary adventure by one of our most daring novelists.
In 1928 New Orleans, eighteen-year-old Sonny LaSalle is a top prep student and champion amateur boxer -- and he venerates his fraternal twin uncles, Buck and Russell, armed robbers who love their profession. Sonny secretly believes that he, too, is a natural outlaw and persuades his uncles to take him on as a partner. But when a bank job goes bad, Sonny is sent to jail, where he unintentionally kills a policeman who is the son of the most feared lawman in Louisiana, widely known as "John Bones." After nine months in the infamous Angola penitentiary, Sonny makes a harrowing escape and manages to reunite with Buck and Russell. The carefree trio head out for the boomtowns of west Texas, where the money flows as freely as the oil, unaware that vengeance follows close behind, as the cool, calculating John Bones begins a relentless campaign to hunt down Sonny ... no matter what.
"James Carlos Blake is a master at weaving historical fact into fiction. Two generations of Wolfe men--begat by an English pirate in New Hampshire in 1828--track their violent but manifest destiny through the Diaz Regime in Mexico in the early 1900s and back to Gulf Coast Texas. The novel centers on two sets of identical "hero twins," each with a violent history that mirror the author's belief on the primacy of violence in the evolution of civilization. Their lives are intertwined with important events through the history of the United States, beginning in the 1820s. Crucial are the histories of the infamous Saint Patrick's Battalion (revered in Mexico as "los San Patricios") who deserted the U.S. Army during the Mexican-American War (1846-1848) and the rise and fall of Porfirio Diaz Regime (1876-1910), which marked the beginning of the Mexican Revolution"--Provided by publisher.
A “gritty, raw, bare-knuckled” collection of stories set along the US-Mexico border from the LA Times Book Prize–winning author of In the Rogue Blood (Publishers Weekly). In this extraordinary collection of short fiction, James Carlos Blake, “one of the greatest chroniclers of the mythical American outlaw life” and author of the Wolfe Family series of border noir novels, journeys from the nineteenth-century Mexican frontier to the borderlands of today (Entertainment Weekly). Borderlands begins with Blake’s personal essay, “The Outsiders,” which recounts his own straddling of worlds and identities. In the following eight stories, we meet characters like Don Sebastián Cabrillo...
Inspired by Arthur Ashe’s bestselling memoir Days of Grace, a collection of positive, uplifting stories of seemingly small acts of grace from across the sports world that have helped to bridge cultural and racial divides. Like many people of color, James Blake has experienced the effects of racism firsthand—publicly—first at the U.S. Open, and then in front of his hotel on a busy Manhattan street, where he was tackled and handcuffed by a police officer in a case of "mistaken identity." Though rage would have been justified, Blake faced both incidents with dignity and aplomb. In Ways of Grace he reflects on his experiences and explores those of other sports stars and public figures who ...