Daddy Cool

We're back and more hard-boiled than ever.

Call us self-serving, but this time we'd like to thank some of the critics who've supported Old School Books. In case you missed it, here's what a few of them had to say:

Spin: "Walking the mean streets with hearts set on dreams they know damn well they'll never reach, these authors keep it realer than any rapper knows how.... They testify to how much was lost when these novelists couldn't get read as seriously as they should have."

The Source: "They take the brutality and ruin of the urban black landscape and transform them into art."

Playboy: "One of the most exciting literary revival series since the rediscovery of Jim Thompson's novels."

Detour: "The Old School will give the modern reader a wakeup slap, alerting them to a subversive canon too long ignored."

Details: "Down-and-dirty tales about real O.G.'s, stories that drop you in the middle of the crumbling inner cities for a streetlevel view of the black urban experience.... If you like the pageturning pulp of Raymond Chandler, James Ellroy, and Jim Thompson, definitely add the Old School to your hard-boiled syllabus."

Time Out: "Unflinching biographies of the streets.... a bloodsoaked landmark of crime fiction."

USA Today: "Harder than a set of brass knuckles and pulpier than home-squeezed orange juice.... With any luck the legacy of the Old School Books writers will not be lost again."

New York Newsday: "The editors have unearthed a motherload of revelation; a shadow tradition of hot-wired prose playing its own variations on noir with bebop abandon and rhythm-and-blues momentum."

Kind words, and don't think we aren't grateful.

While we've got your attention, we'd like to make this important announcement. OSB will soon unveil its first hardcover reissue: Chester Himes's lost classic, Cast the First Stone. Least that's what the world has called it until now. With a little help from some friends, we've restored one hundred (or so) pages from Himes's original manuscript, "dyed" several of the characters black as they were in Himes's earliest editions, and are publishing it under its original title, Yesterday Will Make You Cry. We consider it nothing less than a literary revelation-we hope you will too.

Until then, we hope you enjoy our terrific trio of new titles. And be sure to keep those cards and letters coming.

edited by Marc Gerald and Samuel Blumenfeld