Nothing is quite as it seems in this lush retelling of Dickens' classic coming-of-age story with colorful characters: conspirators, rogues, rakes, and wretches.

"At nine-years-old, D. Watkins has three concerns in life: picking his dad's lotto numbers, keeping his Nikes free of creases, and being a man. Directly in his periphery is east Baltimore, a poverty-stricken city battling the height of a crack epidemic just hours from the nation's capital. Watkins, like many boys around him, is thrust out of childhood and into a world where manhood means surviving by slinging crack on street corners and finding himself...

This story features two very different Southside Chicagoan teenagers who set out to gain the respect of their crews. All the while the community unites in an attempt to defuse the conflict and keep the boys alive.

"In Separate and Unequal, historian Steven M. Gillon offers a revelatory new history of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders--popularly known as the Kerner Commission. Convened by President Lyndon Johnson after riots in Newark and Detroit left dozens dead and thousands injured, the commission issued a report in 1968 that attributed the unrest to "white racism" and called for aggressive new programs to end racism and poverty. "Our nation...

"Pedro and Marques Take Stock is a modern picaresque novel and a vivid satire on social mobility set in the favelas of Brazil, telling the story of two supermarket stock clerks whose lives are upturned when their small-time marijuana business takes off"--