Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned - Softcover

Mosley, Walter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0671014994 ISBN 13: 9780671014995

Publisher: Pocket Books, 1998

Synopsis

Meet Socrates Fortlow, a tough ex-con seeking truth and redemption in South Central Los Angeles-- and finding the miracle of survival. "I either committed a crime or had a crime done to me every day I was in jail. Once you go to prison you belong there." Socrates Fortlow has done his time: twenty-seven years for murder and rape, acts forged by his huge, rock-breaking hands. Now, he has come home to a new kind of prison: two battered rooms in an abandoned building in Watts. Working for the Bounty supermarket, and moving perilously close to invisibility, it is Socrates who throws a lifeline to a drowning man: young Darryl, whose shaky path is already bloodstained and fearsome. In a place of violence and hopelessness, Socrates offers up his own battle-scarred wisdom that can turn the world around.

About this title

Review

In this cycle of 14 bittersweet stories, Walter Mosley breaks out of the genre--if not the setting--of his bestselling Easy Rawlins detective novels. Only eight years after serving out a prison sentence for murder, Socrates Fortlow lives in a tiny, two-room Watts apartment, where he cooks on a hot plate, scavenges for bottles, drinks and wrestles with his demons. Struggling to control a seemingly boundless rage--as well as the power of his massive "rock-breaking" hands--Socrates must find a way to live an honourable life as a black man on the margins of a white world, a task which takes every ounce of self-control he has.

Easy Rawlins fans might initially find themselves disappointed by the absence of a mystery to unravel. But it's a gripping inner drama that unfolds over the pages of these stories, as Socrates comes to grips with the chaos, poverty and violence around him. He tries to get and keep a job delivering groceries; takes in a young street kid named Darryl, who has his own murder to hide; and helps drive out the neighbourhood crack dealer. Throughout, Mosley captures the rhythms of Watts life in prose both lyrical and hard-edged, resulting in a haunting look at a life bounded by lust, violence, fear and a ruthlessly unsentimental moral vision.

Review

"Mournful, insightful, and mystical. It is also Mosley's best work of fiction."--Elle

"A wonderful book...[with] characters who seem as real as the reader."--Denver Post

"Mosley has constructed a perfect Socrates for millennium's end -- a principled man who finds that the highest meaning of life can be attained through self-knowledge, and who convinces others of the power and value of looking within."--San Francisco Chronicle

"Powerful...hard-hitting, unrelenting, poignant short fiction."--Booklist

"Mosley's style suits his subject perfectly. The prose is sand-papery, the sentence rhythms often rough and jabbing. But then -- sudden surprise -- we come upon moments of undefended lyricism."--Sven Birkerts, The New York Times Book Review

"Unveiling a new, bigger-than-life urban hero...Mosley...confer[s] on the mean streets of contemporary L.A. what filmmaker John Ford helped create for the American West: a gun-slinging mythology of street justice and a gritty, elegiac code of honor...A maverick protagonist."--Publishers Weekly

"Tough but touching stories."--Playboy

"An insistently probing, philosophical gem...set in a world where standard notions of right and wrong have been blown to hell."--Sonoma County Independent

"The work of a writer unafraid of pushing forward his own notions of responsibility and entitlement."--The Los Angeles Times Book Review

About this edition

• Publisher: Pocket Books
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0671014994
• ISBN 13: 9780671014995
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208