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Six Easy Pieces finds Easy Rawlins slipping back into the streets in a series of mysteries. What links School Principal Hiram Newgate to the torching of his own school? Why is Edgar Winters of the Winter Baptist Church protecting a murderer? And what does Etta Mae, Mouse's lover, want when she calls Easy up for the first time since Mouse's death? Murder and mayhem follow as Easy wanders from schoolhouse to whorehouse haunted by the memory of his apparently dead sidekick, Raymond 'Mouse' Alexander. In these mysteries Easy confronts the financial and moral corruption at the heart of the mean streets of Watts in the 1960s. ... Read more

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Easy Rawlins vuelve a ser el protagonista de un libro de Walter Mosley. En esta ocasion con una vida menos agitada. Esta casado con una mujer a la que ama, tiene una hija de pocos meses y se ha convertido en un padre modelo y en un marido devoto. Sus negocios inmobiliarios continuan viento en popa y es el dueno en secreto de varias casas de apartamentos y terrenos. Pero en el barrio donde vive ha habido varios asesinatos de mujeres de vida alegre, y todos llevan la marca de un unico y perversoasesino. Todo se complica cuando la muerta es una estudiante universitaria blanca que se encontraba en los turbios bares de la zona negra de Los Angeles. O tal vez no era asi y los secretos de la vida de la enigmatica mariposa blanca serán el laberinto que Easy Rawlins debera desandar hasta descubrir la identidad del asesino y el por que de las muertes. ... Read more

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The year is 1964, and though Easy seems settled into honest work as a Los Angeles custodian, he's having other problems - notably, his adopted son's wish to quit school, and lingering remorse over the death (in A LITTLE YELLOW DOG) of his homicidal crony, Raymond "Mouse" Alexander. Yet he remains willing to do "favors" for folks in need. So, when Alva Torres comes to him, worried that her son, Brawly Brown, will get into trouble running with black revolutionaries, Easy agrees to find the young man and "somehow ...get him back home." His first day on the job, however, Rawlins stumbles across Alva's ex-husband - murdered - and he's soon dodging police, trying to connect a black activist's demise to a weapons cache, and exposing years of betrayal that have made Brawly an ideal pawn in disastrous plans. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

wellreadbrotha
another wonderful easy rawlins adventure. my alltime favorite slueth gives us more twist and turns on the way to a thrilling finish. walter mosley is the best mystery writer of our time! ... Read more

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These twenty short stories boldly and insightfully explore the extremes of human emotions. In her story "Night Talkers," Edwidge Danticat reunites a young man and the elderly aunt who raised him in Haiti. Anthony Doerr brings readers a naturalist who discovers the surprising healing powers of a deadly cone snail. Louise Erdrich writes of an Ojibwa fiddler whose music brings him deep and mysterious joy. Here are diverse and intriguing characters -- a kidnapper, an immigrant nanny, an amputee blues musician -- who are as surprised as the reader is at what brings them happiness.
In his introduction, Walter Mosley explores the definition of a good short story, and writes, "The writers represented in this collection have told stories that suggest much larger ideas. I found myself presented with the challenge of simple human love contrasted against structures as large as religion and death. The desire to be loved or to be seen, represented on a canvas so broad that it would take years to explain all the roots that bring us to the resolution." Each of these stories bravely evokes worlds brimming with desire and loss, humanity and possibility.

Since its inception in 1915, the Best American series has become the premier annual showcase for the country's finest short fiction and nonfiction. For each volume, a series editor reads pieces from hundreds of periodicals, then selects between fifty and a hundred outstanding works. That selection is pared down to twenty or so very best pieces by a guest editor who is widely recognized as a leading writer in his or her field. This unique system has helped make the Best American series the most respected -- and most popular -- of its kind.
Lending a fresh perspective to a perennial favorite, Walter Mosley has chosen unforgettable short stories by both renowned writers and exciting newcomers. The Best American Short Stories 2003 features poignant tales that explore the nuances of family life and love, birth and death. Here are stories that will, as Mosley writes in his introduction, "live with the reader long after the words have been translated into ideas and dreams. That's because a good short story crosses the borders of our nations and our prejudices and our beliefs."

Dorothy Allison
Edwidge Danticat
E. L. Doctorow
Louise Erdrich
Adam Haslett
ZZ Packer
Mona Simpson
Mary Yukari Waters ... Read more

Customer Reviews (11)

Not that great...
What has happened to literature? These stories are poorly written in my opinion. If these are the best, I'd hate to see the worst American short stories. Take "Moriya", a piece of trash written by Dean Paschal included in this collection for example. Hey Dean: just because no one has written a story about an adolescent "mecahnical minded" boy fantasizing, masturbating, and having sex with a doll doesn't make your story great literature. I've given up one American writing for the present...

A selection from MFA Land
Sigh. Not that most of these stories are actually bad but they do suffer from what an earlier reviewer called a "constricted cautiousness". Besides, maybe I've read too many of these types of pieces already but wow - are some of the themes here familiar. For example, being working-class in America (or a working class immigrant) really pounds rocks. And hey - there sure is a lot of quiet desperation in them there suburbs. Yawn yawn yawn.

Just very good literature
This delicious short stories collection has taken me a long time to read. Not because the stories were boring or bad but since every story was so condensed, rich and powerful I could not easily part from a certain state of mind and place and move on the next story.
I try to think what are the similar features of these 2003 stories and what can they say about our time...these are very different subjects, characters and places but maybe I could say that the stories discuss a self growth of some sort. Be it a teenager boy having his first sexual encounter with a demonically bewitching mechanically doll or a person reflecting how his life has developed from a certain event as a Chinese delivery boy in the streets of New York -- but off course I guess this is a too easy generalization that can be said of any story whatsoever.
"Why the sky turns red when the sun goes down" by Ryan Harty is a good example of the stories ability to emotionally stir you up and touch an issue very relevant for parents everywhere, maybe this is what made this story so special for me. The story starts out as a very ordinary family crisis tale. The father learns that something happened to his boy and goes out to fetch him. The turning point comes when the boy is seen lying down with his hand thrown a few yards away from his body. Slowly you realize that this is a mechanical child and prepare yourself for some science fiction descriptions, which do not arrive. Apart from the very central "mechanical boy" fact this is a very real story in all its levels, with nothing "modern" or alienated about it.By the end of the story I remained with the strong feeling that mechanical or not, the parents are facing the same questions parents everywhere are asking themselves and mainly "are we doing the right thing". How do we keep our children and families safe? What are the lies we tell our children and ourselves in order to keep us safe? "Why the sky turns red..." has the heavy atmosphere that is very characteristic of many of the other stories in this collection. Something hard and heavy is hanging above and the characters are having a hard time trying to push it away, like a certain pain that has become a part of your life. The story "The Bees" suffers (or rather enjoys?) the same heavy atmosphere, only here this is not something between husband and wife but between a man and himself. The man is in turmoil because of something in the past that clouds his present. When the punishment arrives, you accept it as the anticipation and tension has been built up all along.
I did not read the previous Best American Short stories but feel as if Walter Mosely has done an incredible job. Or maybe these fine authors have made his job easier. This is a masterpiece collection of stories.
"Ghost Knife", "Moriya", " Baby Wilson", "Devotion" and "Future Emergencies" are some of my favorite stories in this collection. Off course I can relate easily to stories which discuss women, parents or people who are in a position similar to mine, but the greatness of these stories is that you can feel the pain, helplessness and anger of people in totally different surroundings and situations, such as immigrants recalling something in their past or people from another culture all together (the stories "Night Talkers" or "Marie-Ange's Ginen" which are set in Haiti for example).
This is truly good literature and my only regret is that I cannot discuss these stories in a literature class so I can understand all the further layers.
Do not miss the last few pages of the book where every writer gives a few lines about his story and how it came through.

if you only read one story, read "The Bees"
Having never read one of the "Best American Short Stories" collections, I have no way to judge this latest edition to past efforts.The only thing I can speak to is how I felt about the stories contained in this collection and how good I think they are.There are some very fine stories in this collection with one in particular that I just loved.

Louise Erdrich has long been my favorite novelist, but I was still nervous about what she would make from the short story format."Shamengwa" is a moving story which revolves around a violin and the effect it has had, in various ways, on the lives of several members of a community.Anthony Doerr has one of the better stories in the collection, "The Shell Collector".With such a deceptively simple title, one would not expect such raw power and an interesting story about a man who lives alone but has gained worldwide attention because of the poison in one particular kind of shell.Another standout is Ryan Harty's "Why the Sky Turns Red when the Sun Goes Down", a story of a family with a robotic son (literally, the boy is a robot, or, perhaps an android).This is a touching story.

The best story in the collection, and then one that blew me away is Dan Chaon's "The Bees".This one was completely unexpected and shocking.While this one would probably fall into the category of "horror", don't let that mislead you.This one starts out easy, just identifying a man and his family and we start to learn about his past.He wasn't a good man during his first marriage and he deeply regrets it.But as the story continues and we get snippets of revelation, the tension grows and so does this air of creepiness that I got while I was reading it.The tension does not let up until the end of the story, but rather it keeps building because we don't quite know what is going on and this is not what you would assume a typical "horror" story would be.It is a psychological horror and it is just gripping.

This is a very fine collection, but "The Bees" was the one story that truly stood out for me and itcontinues to be memorable.

-Joe Sherry

disappointing
I so look forward to these annual volumes of BEST short stories.These collections normally have such a variety of subject and style.Not this volume. The subject of nearly every story was the alienation of immigrants in America.For the first time ever, I didn't finish reading the collection.I mean, I love popcorn, but want variety! ... Read more

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High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Walter Ellis Mosley (born January 12, 1952) is a prominent American novelist, most widely recognized for his crime fiction. He has written a series of best-selling historical mysteries featuring the hard-boiled detective Easy Rawlins, a black private investigator and World War II veteran living in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles; they are perhaps his most popular works.Mosley was born in, Watts, Los Angeles, California. His mother, Ella (née Slatkin), was Polish Jewish and worked as a personnel clerk, and his father, Leroy Mosley, was an African American supervising custodian at an Los Angeles public school from Louisiana who had worked as a clerk in the segregated US army during the Second World War. His parents tried to marry in 1951 but, though the union was legal in California where they were living, no one would give them a license. ... Read more

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Walter Mosley, a favourite author of President Bill Clinton, is the most important African-American writer of crime fiction since Chester B. Himes. This Genre Fiction Sightline offers the reader of Mosley's fiction extensive and illuminating notes and annotations, plus an appreciative essay and a bibliography, all designed toenrich the reader's experience of this writer and this novel.

Mosley's novels chronicling the investigations of Easy Rawlins chart Californian history from 1948, echoing Chandler (and John D. MacDonald) while challenging Ellroy's L.A. Quartet. He has also written other crime and SF novels, Young Adult fiction, a memoir, and activist non-fiction, and is widely involved in cultural and educational projects promoting writing by people of colour. Devil in a Blue Dress is the first novel in Mosley's outstanding 'Easy' Rawlins series. The Notes in this book provide an overview of Mosley's career and the series, give historical and literary backgrounds to the novel (including Chandler, Himes, Pinkerton Men and Private Eyes, Hollywood's Gumshoes, and the 'GI Bill'), and consider the film adaptation of Devil. Chapter by chapter Annotations detail allusions, slang, musical references, flora and fauna, and fashion, while disentangling Mosley's real and fictive Los Angeles. The Essay is 'In the Mortgage of his Skin', and uses Walcott's and Lamming's great phrase to ask about Easy's purest passion, the house that is his castle. The Bibliography covers all Mosley's work, with critical material on him and on (African-American) crime writing.

John Lennard's publications include But I Digress: The Exploitation of Parentheses in English Printed Verse (1991), The Poetry Handbook (1996; 2005), with Mary Luckhurst The Drama Handbook (2002), and the Literature Insights Hamlet (2007). He is the general editor of the Genre Fiction Sightlines and Genre Fiction Monographs series, and has written several Sightlines titles, as well as two critical collections, Of Modern Dragons and other essays on Genre Fiction (2007) and Of Sex and Faeries; furthrr Essays in Genre Fiction (2010) - both available in Kindle format and in paperback from Troubador.co.uk.
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This is nonfiction commentary. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Chapters: Novels by Walter Mosley, Science Fiction by Walter Mosley, Short Stories by Walter Mosley, Short Story Collections by Walter Mosley, Futureland, Fortunate Son, Little Brother, Blue Light, Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned, Maximum Fantastic Four, Devil in a Blue Dress. Source: Wikipedia. Free updates online. Not illustrated. Excerpt: Futureland is a series of nine loosely connected short pieces of science fiction by writer Walter Mosley. The novel is set in a postcyberpunk dystopian universe populated by humans living in a shellshocked, unfairly stratified society overseen by super-rich technocrats. Whispers in the Dark - Details the early life of one Ptolemy Bent, a young black child who has the greatest IQ the world has ever known, and the purest heart possible in the world he is born into. The Greatest - The rise of Fera Jones, the first female heavyweight Universal Boxing Authority world champion. Doctor Kismet - An interview between the CEO of MacroCode International, the world's most powerful corporation, and one of the leader's of the Sixth Radical Congress, a movement to strengthen the positions of African-Americans in world society. Angel's Island - The tale of a prisoner on the world's largest privately owned prison and how he came to expose its dark secrets. The Electric Eye - A detective story focusing on one Folio Johnson, the "last private detective in New York". Folio is hired to investigate the mysterious deaths of members of an elite Neo-Fascists think tank group known as the International Socialists, "The Itsies". Voices Little Brother - A courtroom trial for the death of a policeman in Common Ground, where the defendant can afford neither an attorney nor a judge. He is thus tried and matches wits with a judicial automaton prog...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=4355683 ... Read more