The inspiration for the major motion picture starring Ryan Gosling, Drive is a dark thriller that was named an Entertainment Weekly Top 10 Book of the Year and a Washington Post Best Book of the Year. This edition will feature extra materials, including a reading group guide and author Q&A. Driver works as a stunt driver by day and a getaway driver by night. He drives, that's all-until he's double-crossed. And suddenly, driving isn't enough any more... but murder might be.

"Gizmo" is the GI term for the unidentifiable--and that's the way that Toddy Kent has begun to think of the reasons behind the rapid swing of his days. Somehow, Kent seems always to find himself regularly confronted with The Big Break every man would kill for--only to see it slip through his fingers.
Kent's grinding out a paycheck buying gold on the cheap and selling it for the slimmest of profits when he stumbles into his latest, almost mythical discovery--pure, unadulterated gold in the form of a priceless watch he didn't "exactly" mean to steal.
Soon Kent finds himself at the center of a whirlwind of danger involving everyone from the woman he can't seem to shake, bail bondsmen who get word of Kent's discovery, the Treasury Department, his pawnbroker, and a devious old man with a dog that may or may not be able to speak English, in a rip-roaring comedy of errors and would-you-believe-it bad luck unlike anything you've ever read.
Who ever knew one lousy watch could bring so much trouble? And how many times can Kent avoid getting killed before his luck runs out for good?

Winner of the 2019 H.R.F. Keating Award for the best biographical or critical book related to crime fiction Originally published by Gryphon Books in 1993, Difficult Lives was one of the earliest attempts to track the legacy of original paperback writers such as Jim Thompson, David Goodis and Chester Himes. The individual essays on these three first appeared in literary magazines. Difficult Lives visits a rare moment when daylight was showing around the seams of American society and visions quite in contrast to the sanctioned version drifted to the surface in books one bought off racks in drugstores and bus stations -- stark, bonelike, disturbing books. We're pleased to make Difficult Lives available again, doubling your pleasure by pairing it with Hitching Rides, an equal volume of new essays on other crime writers including Derek Raymond, Jean-Patrick Manchette, Patricia Highsmith and Shirley Jackson.

At age eight, Jenny Rowan was abducted and kept for two years in a box beneath her captor's bed. Eventually she escaped and, after living for eighteen months on cast-offs at the local mall, was put into the child-care system. Suing for emancipation, at age sixteen she became a legal adult. Nowadays she works as a production editor for the local public TV station, and is one of the world's good people. One evening she returns home to find a detective waiting for her. Though her records are sealed, he somehow knows her story. He asks if she can help with a young woman who, like her many years before, has been abducted and traumatized.Initially hesitant, Jenny decides to get involved, reviving buried memories and setting in motion an unexpected interchange with the president herself. As brilliantly spare and compact as are all of James Sallis's novels, Others of My Kind stands apart for its female protagonist. Set in a near future of political turmoil, it is a story of how we overcome, how we shape ourselves by what happens to us, and of how the human spirit, whatever horrors it undergoes, will not be put down.

A hired killer on his final job; a burned-out detective whose wife is dying slowly and in agony; a young boy abandoned by his parents and living alone by his wits. Three people, solitary and disconnected from society. The detective is looking for the killer, Christian, though he doesn't know that. Christian is trying to find the man who stepped in and took down his target before he had the chance. And the boy, Jimmie, is having the killer's dreams. While they never meet, they are inextricably linked, and as their stories unfold, all find the solace of community. In what is at one and the same time a coming-of-age novel, a realistic crime novel and a novel of the contemporary Southwest, The Killer Is Dying is above all the story of three men of vastly different age and background, and of the shape their lives take against the unforgiving sunlight and sprawl of America's fifth largest city, Phoenix.

When a middle-aged alcoholic is found brutally battered to death on a roadside in West London, the case is assigned to a nameless detective sergeant, a tough-talking cynic and fearless loner from the Department of Unexplained Deaths at the Factory police station. Working from cassette tapes left behind in the dead man's property, our narrator must piece together the history of his blighted existence and discover the agents of its cruel end. What he doesn't expect is that digging for the truth will demand plenty of lying, and that the most terrible of villains will also prove to be the most attractive. In the first of six police procedurals that comprise the Factory series, Derek Raymond spins a riveting, and vividly human crime drama. Relentlessly pursuing justice for the dispossessed, his detective narrator treads where few others dare: in the darkest corners of London, a city of sin plagued by unemployment, racism and vice, and peopled by a cast of low-lifes, all utterly convincing and brought to life by Raymond's pitch-perfect dialogue.

'Much later, as he sat with his back against an inside wall of a Motel 6 just north of Phoenix, watching the pool of blood lap toward him, Driver would wonder whether he had made a terrible mistake. Later still, of course, there'd be no doubt. But for now Driver is, as they say, in the moment. And the moment includes this blood lapping toward him, the pressure of dawn's late light at windows and door, traffic sounds from the interstate nearby, the sound of someone weeping in the next room....' Thus begins Drive, a new novella by James Sallis. Set mostly in Arizona and L.A., the story is, according to Sallis, '...about a guy who does stunt driving for movies by day and drives for criminals at night.' In classic noir fashion, he is double-crossed and, though before he has never participated in the violence ("I drive. That's all."), he goes after the ones who doublecrossed and tried to kill him.

Michel Hartog, a sometime architect, is a powerful businessman and famous philanthropist whose immense fortune has just grown that much greater following the death of his brother in an accident. Peter is his orphaned nephew--a spoiled brat. Julie is in an insane asylum. Thompson is a hired gunman with a serious ulcer. Michel hires Julie to look after Peter. And he hires Thompson to kill them. Julie and Peter escape. Thompson pursues. Bullets fly. Bodies accumulate.
The craziness is just getting started.
Like Jean-Patrick Manchette's celebrated "Fatale," "The Mad and the Bad" is a clear-eyed, cold-blooded, pitch-perfect work of creative destruction.

Lucio, a normal man in a normal (nosy) city neighborhood with normal problems with his wife (not the easiest person to get along with) and family and job (he lost it) finds he has a much bigger problem: his wife is a dog. At first, it doesn't seem like such a problem, because the German shepherd inhabiting his wife's body is actually a good deal more agreeable than his wife herself, now occupying the body of the same German shepherd in a mental hospital run by scientists who, it appears, have designs on the whole neighborhood. But then Lucio has a sense, however confused, of what's right, which is an even bigger problem yet.

"Asleep in the Sun" is the great work of the Argentine master Adolfo Bioy Casares's later years. Like his legendary "Invention of Morel," it is an intoxicating mixture of fantasy, sly humor, and menace. Whether read as a fable of modern politics, a meditation on the elusive parameters of the self, or a most unusual love story, Bioy's book is an almost scarily perfect comic turn, as well as a pure delight.

Mulholland Books takes pleasure in restoring to print an acclaimed novel of espionage and suspense by the author of Drive.
David (as he's currently known) was a member of an elite corps of spies trained during the coldest days of the Cold War. For almost a decade he has been out of the game, working as a sculptor. Then a phone call in the middle of the night awakens him: the only other survivor from that elite corps has gone rogue. David is tasked with stopping him.
What ensues is an existential cat-and-mouse game played out across the American landscape, through the diners and motels that dot the terrain like green plastic houses on a Monopoly board. Both a suspenseful novel of pursuit and a thematically rich exploration of the mind of a spy, Death Will Have Your Eyes is a contemporary classic of the espionage genre.

No one writes a better crime novel than Charles Willeford Elmore Leonard THE BLACK MASS OF BROTHER SPRINGER tells the story of Sam Springer, a drifter novelist who meets Jack Dover, the retiring Abbot of the Church of God's Flock. Dover's final official act is to ordain Springer and send him off to serve as pastor of an all-Black church in Jacksonville, Florida. ... and with the church deacon's earthy young wife, Merita. The Washington post calls this darkly humorous novel by Charles Willeford, one of the great crime writers of the 20th century, his masterpiece. This new edition is introduced by James Sallis and contains Willeford's previously unpublished play based on the novel.

The environment that we construct affects both humans and our natural world in myriad ways. There is a pressing need to create healthy places and to reduce the health threats inherent in places already built. However, there has been little awareness of the adverse effects of what we have constructed-or the positive benefits of well designed built environments.
This book provides a far-reaching follow-up to the pathbreaking "Urban Sprawl and Public Health," published in 2004. That book sparked a range of inquiries into the connections between constructed environments, particularly cities and suburbs, and the health of residents, especially humans. Since then, numerous studies have extended and refined the book's research and reporting. "Making Healthy Places" offers a fresh and comprehensive look at this vital subject today.
There is no other book with the depth, breadth, vision, and accessibility that this book offers. In addition to being of particular interest to undergraduate and graduate students in public health and urban planning, it will be essential reading for public health officials, planners, architects, landscape architects, environmentalists, and all those who care about the design of their communities.
Like a well-trained doctor, " Making Healthy Places" presents a diagnosis of-and offers treatment for-problems related to the built environment. Drawing on the latest scientific evidence, with contributions from experts in a range of fields, it imparts a wealth of practical information, with an emphasis on demonstrated and promising solutions to commonly occurring problems.

The POINT BLANK READER series is dedicated to introducing you to the finest novelists in the mystery and crime fiction genres in carefully selected volumes that each include a full length novel, selected shorter fiction and other writings by the author. JAMES SALLIS is the author of the acclaimed Lew Griffin series of detective novels, multiple collections of short fiction, essays, poems, musicology, a biography of Chester Himes, and several other books. This volume includes his novels DEATH WILL HAVE YOUR EYES and RENDERINGS, numerous short stories, poems, personal essays and articles on crime writers such as Patricia Highsmith, Gerald Kersh and others. "Ever among the most unconventional and interesting writers of crime fiction." KIRKUS REVIEWS

From crimes of heart and crimes of violence, A CITY EQUAL TO MY DESIRE effortlessly guides you through the narrows of human existence in all its forms. In this selection of new stories, James Sallis, author of the acclaimed Lew Griffin series of detective novels, both entertains and engages the mind with stories that will linger in memory long after they've been experienced. "Sallis wants to take your experience of the world, mutate it to the edge of recognition, and then deliver it back before your eyes like a coin pulled from behind your earlobe. And in this way, he makes you see and feel, all over again, the meaning, the beauty-and, pointedly sometimes, the horror-of being human." Jack O'Connell from his introduction

From crimes of heart and crimes of violence, A CITY EQUAL TO MY DESIRE effortlessly guides you through the narrows of human existence in all its forms. In this selection of new stories, James Sallis, author of the acclaimed Lew Griffin series of detective novels, both entertains and engages the mind with stories that will linger in memory long after they've been experienced. "Sallis wants to take your experience of the world, mutate it to the edge of recognition, and then deliver it back before your eyes like a coin pulled from behind your earlobe. And in this way, he makes you see and feel, all over again, the meaning, the beauty-and, pointedly sometimes, the horror-of being human." Jack O'Connell from his introduction

The Guitar in Jazz presents in rich, entertaining detail the history and development of the guitar as a jazz instrument. In a series of essays by some of jazz's leading historians and critics, the volume traces the impressive evolution of jazz guitar playing, from the pioneering styles of Nick Lucas and Eddie Lang through the recent innovations of such contemporary masters as Jim Hall and Ralph Towner. Editor James Sallis has included essays that focus on individual guitarists, including Charlie Christian, Django Reinhardt, and JoePass. Other chapters vividly describe important jazz guitar styles, such as swing guitar and fingerstyle guitar. In all, The Guitar in Jazz provides a full and captivating portrait of the guitar's place in jazz. The book also offers insights into the larger history of jazz-its development, the social contexts in which the music came into being, and its eventual recognition as "the American classical music." The essays will appeal to guitar players and enthusiasts, and to all jazz lovers. James Sallis is a guitar player and writer. He is the author of The Guitar Players, available as a Bison Book, and of the novels The Long-Legged Fly, Moth, and Black Hornet.

The poignant and surprising new thriller by one of America's most acclaimed writers.
Few American writers create more memorable landscapes--both natural and interior--than James Sallis. His highly praised Lew Griffin novels evoked classic New Orleans and the convoluted inner space of his black private detective. More recently--in "Cypress Grove" and "Cripple Creek"--he has conjured a small town somewhere near Memphis, where John Turner--ex-policeman, ex-con, war veteran and former therapist--has come to escape his past. But the past proved inescapable; thrust into the role of Deputy Sheriff, Turner finds himself at the center of his new community, one that, like so many others, is drying up, disappearing before his eyes.
As "Salt River" begins, two years have passed since Turner's amour, Val Bjorn, was shot as they sat together on the porch of his cabin. Sometimes you just have to see how much music you can make with what you have left, Val had told him, a mantra for picking up the pieces around her death, not sure how much he "or" the town has left. Then the sheriff's long-lost son comes plowing down Main Street into City Hall in what appears to be a stolen car. And waiting at Turner's cabin is his good friend, Eldon Brown, Val's banjo on the back of his motorcycle so that it looks as though he has two heads. "They think I killed someone," he says. Turner asks: "Did you?" And Eldon responds: "I don't know." Haunted by his own ghosts, Turner nonetheless goes in search of a truth he's not sure he can live with.
James Sallis has been called by critics one of the best writers in America. "It's a crime that a writer this good isn't better known," wrote David Montgomery in the"Chicago Tribune," while Marilyn Stasio in the "New York Times" "Book Review" called his Turner books "a superior series...a keeper." "Salt River" will take his reputation even higher and reach the wider audience he so richly deserves.

"The guitar and American music are inexorably intertwined," writes James Sallis in The Guitar Players. He notes that "American music was built on the backs of black slaves." The great classical blues period of the 1920s had rich antecedents going back further than plantation orchestras featuring fiddles and bajos. The introduction of the guitar, at first not a solo instrument, really demonstrated rhythmic ingenuity. Sallis shows how folk music and a cross-fertilization of traditions and techniques resulted in blues, ragtime, jazz, rock 'n' roll, and country-western. He writes eloquently about fourteen transitional or pivotal performers: the Mississippi Sheiks; Lonnie Johnson, the first virtuoso blues guitarist; Eddie Lang, the first great jazz guitarist; Roy Smeck, the foremost popularizer of guitar playing; Charlie Christian, the founder of modern jazz guitar; Riley Puckett, the first great country-music guitarist; T-Bone Walker, "daddy of the blues"; George Barnes; Hank Garland; Wes Montgomery, the jazz innovator; Mike Bloomfield, the heavy-rock guitarist; Ry Cooder; Ralph Towner; and Lenny Breau. James Sallis, who grew up in Helena, Arkansas, a town with a history of blues activity, is a free-lance writer. The Long-Legged Fly was named one of the best mysteries of the year by the Los Angeles Times. Moth is his second novel to feature the black New Orleans detective Lew Griffin.