Best known for his collaborations with cartoonist brother Drew (Any Resemblance to Persons Living or Dead…, Warts and All), his acclaimed collections Tales of Times Square, Tell the Truth Until They Bleed and the Terry Southern anthology Now Dig This, author and musician Josh Alan Friedman returns with Black Cracker, his long-awaited first novel.

A memoir from the flashpoint of the Civil Rights movement, Black Cracker begins in the first grade classroom of the last segregated school on Long Island, where Josh is the only white student. Thus begins a four-year odyssey of strange, thrilling adventures and harsh realities from a childhood spent with one foot in Long Island’s well-to-do suburbs and one in its now-forgotten poor Black shantytowns.

 Challenging long-held preconceptions about race, class and character, Black Cracker boldly moves beyond mere “culture clash” into “multicultural steel-cage match.” An alarming, frank and brutally funny book in Friedman's trademark pull-no-punches style, Black Cracker is at once comic and profoundly heartbreaking.

A Minute to Pray, A Second to Die by Chris D. ($24.95, New Texture, trade paperback)

 
An epic career anthology by Los Angelespunk rock icon Chris D. (The Flesh Eaters, Divine Horsemen). A highly respected film scholar whose non-fiction book Outlaw Masters of Japanese Film is a touchstone work, he's also known for the many years he spent as programmer for the American Cinematheque in Hollywood, as an actor (Border Radio, No Way Out), and for his numerous DVD audio commentaries.

 
A Minute to Pray...collects 35 years of Chris D.’s lyrics, poetry, short stories and excerpts from his novels. It also serves as an autobiography of sorts, with nakedly candid passages throughout that providing context for and commentary on a storied career. A Minute to Pray... includes a preface by Byron Coley, a foreword by John Doe and an afterword by Lydia Lunch.

 An exhaustive collection of writing by one of the godfathers of punk rock, Chris D.’s deeply cathartic, intensely cinematic writing lurks in the shadowlands between arthouse and grindhouse… Think 19th Century romanticism roughed up by James M. Cain, “cut up” by William S. Burroughs, and screened on a wall at a bordertown drive-in.

Stop Requestedby Wyatt Doyle; illustrated by Stanley J. Zappa ($14.95, New Texture, trade paperback)

 Wyatt Doyle presents a short story cycle set on the buses and trains of Hollywood’s public transportation system, profusely illustrated with sharp, surreal images by Stanley J. Zappa.

 The lost, the delusional, the disenfranchised and the drunk may not be the only people who ride the buses in L.A., but there sure are a lot of them on there. And as is only appropriate to the entertainment capital of the world, their naked city stories are shot through with comedy, tragedy, action, drama—even the odd musical number. Street-level tales of faded hopes, low income, missed.