Final volume in the critically acclaimed "Connected" series of novels. Follow this last chapter in the life of gangster Trouble Ventura through his diaries, stories and poetry.

A small-time Capone hood named Johnny Pepys (“peeps,” after Samuel Pepys, the famous English diarist), is called upon to take dictation of the wounded kingpin’s memoirs, and soon finds himself caught between a deal he made with Bugsy Moran and Capone’s hostile and suspicious underlings. A humorous parody of “The Untouchables.” Stage Play (7m/3f) 45 min.

Ivan Johnson is a crime figure who grew up in Detroit. From the age of fifteen after watching his dad die in his arms, he takes over his dad’s business. He embarks on a fast life that includes a drug addiction, a few stormy romances, and a couple of prison sentences. His aggression and street fame led to him becoming a murderer. One of his latest victims, Marcus Washington strikes the most guilt in him as he stands trial for a double homicide. The victim’s wife, Sandra Washington, captures Ivan’s attention. After seeing her pain, Ivan begins to write Sandra a series of letters detailing his life story from his childhood to the murder of Sandra’s husband.

The highly acclaimed novel that reveals the life of a Vietnamese family in America through the knowing eyes of a child finding her place and voice in a new country. “A brilliant evocation of human sorrow and desire.... Heartbreaking and exhilarating.” —The New York Times Book Review In 1978 six refugees—a girl, her father, and four “uncles”—are pulled from the sea to begin a new life in San Diego. In the child’s imagination, the world is transmuted into an unearthly realm: she sees everything intensely, hears the distress calls of inanimate objects, and waits for her mother to join her. But life loses none of its strangeness when the family is reunited. As the girl grows, her matter-of-fact innocence eddies increasingly around opaque and ghostly traumas: the cataclysm that engulfed her homeland, the memory of a brother who drowned and, most inescapable, her father’s hopeless rage.