Death Don't Have No Mercy

"William Boyle does for the small damaged towns of New York what Nelson Algren did for Chicago: he makes the streets sing with piss-pot poetry and gut-bucket blues. These are edgy stories about people who would have to pull themselves up to walk the line, people who spend so much time in bars, drunks and bartenders start to look like family. In here, hardship is a given, failure too, but Boyle's beautiful prose infuses his characters with a deep sense of knowledge and dignity and awareness,...