Hoping for a better life, many migrants have made the journey to South Africa and set up as informal spaza shop traders in small towns and township areas, supplying the local residents with essentials. These traders work hard, open their shops early, close late and support their relatives and kinspeople in starting new businesses. But thriving in environments afflicted by unemployment and crime is almost impossible when armed robberies are a daily reality, protection from law enforcement is not a given, and access to justice is effectively out of reach.?Engaging first-hand with small traders and the Somali communities in Khayelitsha, Kraaifontein and Philippi, Vanya Gastrow investigates the predicament of these modernday pariahs - social and political outcasts who belong neither to the elite nor the common people, and who are frequently the focus of xenophobic anger. Tracing national-level regulatory developments in post-apartheid democratic South Africa Gastrow shines a light on how retailers have been politicised and how they have faced growing informal and formal regulatory efforts to curtail their business activities. She demonstrates how democratic and constitutional frameworks can erode in contexts of heightened nationalism, populism and economic inequality. By investigating Somali informal shopkeepers' experiences of crime, justice and regulation in the country, the fragility of law, pluralism and democracy in South Africa is uncomfortably exposed

This is it. This is everything Garth Nickels has worked for since landing on Hospitalis. The Box is ... The Box is within his grasp at long last. Gametime, the penultimate showdown between champions looms in the distance. There's just a few problems. Of course there are problems. Naoko Kamagana has been kidnapped by Jordan Bishop and cannot be found. Chadsik al-Taryin has decided to forego all artistic sentiment in favor of murdering Garth Nickels so he can return to Ground Zero, his happy, twisted home of fiends and the fiendish. Kant Ingrams has landed on Hospitalis to discharge his duty to Trinity Itself and is ... is not right. Griffin Jones, Enforcer and Kin'kithal Warrior is desperate to free himself from Trinity's embrace and is willing to do anything to be the one at the top of the heap. Sa Gurant, last Game's victor is ... different. More. Deadlier and infinitely more dangerous than anything in the known Universe. Chairwoman Alyssa Doans has lost her mind and will do whatever it takes to ensure that Garth 'Nickels' N'Chalez doesn't make it out of the ring alive, up to and including dropping missiles on Port City. The beings seeking to attend to Garth Nickels arrive at Hospitalis, bringing with them myths and legends. But ... but that ain't a lot for a guy like Garth to handle, is it? There's just one problem. Garth is powerless. The events of The Museum and Bravo's interference have rendered him virtually human and our faithful hero takes steps to ensure that he survives to enter that most ancient vessel, to find out why he and his slept thirty thousand years. What answers lie inside Bravo? What reasons could push a man to catapult himself thirty thousand years into the future? Only time, perseverance and a whole lotta luck and help from long-missing friends will see Garth 'Nickels' N'Chalez through to the end!

In the years following the Civil War, a veritable army of homeless men swept across America's "wageworkers' frontier" and forged a beguiling and bedeviling counterculture known as "hobohemia." Celebrating unfettered masculinity and jealously guarding the American road as the preserve of white manhood, hoboes took command of downtown districts and swaggered onto center stage of the new urban culture. Less obviously, perhaps, they also staked their own claims on the American polity, claims that would in fact transform the very entitlements of American citizenship. In this eye-opening work of American history, Todd DePastino tells the epic story of hobohemia's rise and fall, and crafts a stunning new interpretation of the "American century" in the process. Drawing on sources ranging from diaries, letters, and police reports to movies and memoirs, Citizen Hobo breathes life into the largely forgotten world of the road, but it also, crucially, shows how the hobo army so haunted the American body politic that it prompted the creation of an entirely new social order and political economy. DePastino shows how hoboes—with their reputation as dangers to civilization, sexual savages, and professional idlers—became a cultural and political force, influencing the creation of welfare state measures, the promotion of mass consumption, and the suburbanization of America. Citizen Hobo's sweeping retelling of American nationhood in light of enduring struggles over "home" does more than chart the change from "homelessness" to "houselessness." In its breadth and scope, the book offers nothing less than an essential new context for thinking about Americans' struggles against inequality and alienation.

“Olivarez steps into the ‘inbetween’ standing between Mexico and America in these compelling, emotional poems. Written with humor and sincerity” (Newsweek). Named a Best Book of the Year by Newsweek and NPR. In this “devastating debut” (Publishers Weekly), poet José Olivarez explores the stories, contradictions, joys, and sorrows that embody life in the spaces between Mexico and America. He paints vivid portraits of good kids, bad kids, families clinging to hope, life after the steel mills, gentrifying barrios, and everything in between. Drawing on the rich traditions of Latinx and Chicago writers like Sandra Cisneros and Gwendolyn Brooks, Olivarez creates a home out of life in the in-between. Combining wry humor with potent emotional force, Olivarez takes on complex issues of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and immigration using an everyday language that invites the reader in, with a unique voice that makes him a poet to watch. “The son of Mexican immigrants, Olivarez celebrates his Mexican-American identity and examines how those two sides conflict in a striking collection of poems.” —USA Today