Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned

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

New York Times bestselling author Walter Mosley introduces us to Socrates Fortlow, an "astonishing character" (Los Angeles Times Book Review) in this acclaimed collection of linked stories.

"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 own two rock-breaking hands. Now, he has come home to a new kind of prison: two battered rooms in an abandoned building in Watts. Working a dead-end job at the supermarket and moving perilously close to invisibility, Socrates seeks inner truth and redemption amid the violence and hopelessness of South Central Los Angeles. In fourteen intertwining tales, Socrates grapples with situations that are never easy as he attempts to hold on to a job and offer a lifeline to a young man on his same bloodstained path. In Socrates's battle-scarred wisdom, there is hope of turning the world around in this "powerful, hard-hitting, unrelenting, poignant short fiction" (Booklist).

“" 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."”

"A wonderful book...[with] characters who seem as real as the reader."-- "Denver Post"
"An insistently probing, philosophical gem...set in a world where standard notions of right and wrong have been blown to hell."-- "Sonoma County Independent"
"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"
"Mournful, insightful, and mystical. It is also Mosley's best work of fiction."-- "Elle"
"Powerful...hard-hitting, unrelenting, poignant short fiction."-- "Booklist"
"The work of a writer unafraid of pushing forward his own notions of responsibility and entitlement."-- "The Los Angeles 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"

Walter Mosley is the acclaimed author of more than forty books, including the internationally bestselling Easy Rawlins series. His best known Easy Rawlins novels include Devil in a Blue Dress, A Red Death, White Butterfly, Black Betty, and Little Yellow Dog. He is also the author of the collection of stories Always Outnumbered. Always Outgunned featuring Socrates Fortlow, which was the basis for an HBO feature film. A former president of the Mystery Writers of America, he was named a grand master by the organization in 2016. He has served on the board of directors of the National Book Foundation and is a recipient of the PEN American Center Lifetime Achievement Award. A native of Los Angeles, he now lives in New York City.

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