Imprisoned in a dank cottage deep in the English countryside Arthur Doyle lies half-unconscious and at the mercy of his nemesis - Cream. Gathering all his dwindling strength he smashes a window and crawls to safety. With a sharp piece of broken glass he awaits his torturer's return, but the man has eluded him once more, leaving behind the rotting body of a local miser and thwarted in his attempt to obtain money for his 'deadly' cause. Securing the help of the remarkable pioneering criminal...

From ancient Mesopotamia to today, an “exceptionally rich narrative” (Wall Street Journal) of how humans have used laws to forge civilizationsRulers throughout history have used laws to impose order. But laws were not simply instruments of power and social control. They also offered ordinary people a way to express their diverse visions for a better world. In The Rule of Laws, Oxford scholar Fernanda Pirie traces the rise and fall of the s...

While a young medical student at Edinburgh, Arthur Conan Doyle famously studied under the remarkable Dr Joseph Bell. Taking this as a starting point, David Pirie has woven a compelling thriller, which partners Bell and Doyle as pioneers in criminal investigation, exploring the strange underworld of violence and sexual hypocrisy running below the surface of the Victorian era. The Patient's Eyes moves from Edinburgh and the strange circumstances surrounding Doyle's meeting with the remarkabl...

From ancient Mesopotamia to today, an “exceptionally rich narrative” (Wall Street Journal) of how humans have used laws to forge civilizationsRulers throughout history have used laws to impose order. But laws were not simply instruments of power and social control. They also offered ordinary people a way to express their diverse visions for a better world. In The Rule of Laws, Oxford scholar Fernanda Pirie traces the rise and fall of the s...

In this post-lyrical era, poems can be stories, or they can just as easily be exuberant laughter set to words, an experiment in language, or an incidental collation of plays on a Scrabble board.the pet radish, shrunken, the third full collection of poetry from the inimitable Pearl Pirie, deals in the poetics of sound, language, and play. In true Pirie style, this fresh, quirky, and clear-seeing collection speaks in a range of styles and voices: From a military convoy of tur...

The central concept within the ebook “The Dynamics of Gender and Life” is the universe as a self-organising system (SOS) wherein everything and everyone is engaged in an ongoing, dynamic, cyclical, interactive dance between unity and individuality, feminine and masculine, wave and particle, togetherness and separateness, Yin and Yang, possibility and actuality.The exploration of this interactive dynamic yields valuable and useful insights into creativity, ...

The story is about two abandoned children who are left to fend for themselves and strange things start to happen. Puzzle pieces start to appear for no known reason, and the children disap Who is the mastermind behind this plot?

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 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 per...

Inside the phobic and the crushing we trudge through the wreckage, the slippage, and the comic, in our search for joy. The beauty in these poems is an amalgam, like a gathering storm, of the meteorological and political, the mundane and the distressing.

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 and minds of his people. He takes us into the ring for a hard-fought boxing match and out of the city on a Boy Scout outing. He sits us in the barber’s chair and right under the burning scalp of a ...

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 blood. Here was an unsparing document of Thomas's plunge into the deadly consolations of drugs, street fighting, and armed robbery--a descent that ended when the twenty-two-year-old Piri w...

Jonathan Little, an ex-criminal lawyer, suggests to his cellmate, Daniel Rodriguez, that they should hatch a plan to "get rid" of their wives – who they hate more than anything – for good.Their plan is fool-proof and would be perfect if not for the tenacity of Daniel's wife – the beautiful, courageous, life-embracing Janet Rodriguez.What starts out as a vengeful plot turns into a story of misplaced love and recompense as both men face the women who absorbed most of their li...