Welcome to the Great American Graffiti Novel Number one New York Times bestselling author Adam Mansbach returns with a blockbuster tale pf revenge, redemption, and the world's most beautiful crime. Dondi Vance is the son of two famous graffiti artists from New York City's 'golden era' of subway bombing. Recently kicked out of his prestigious prep school for selling weed-and his mother's Brooklyn apartment for losing his scholarship-he's couch-surfing his way through life, compulsively immune to rumors that his long-lost father, Billy Rage, has returned after sixteen years on the lam. But Dondi's old man really is back - what's left of him that is. A wizened shell of his former self, Billy is still reeling from a psychic attack by an angry shaman in the Amazon basin when Dondi finds him at the top of a pseudo-magical staircase in Dumbo. The uneasy reunion comes just in time- Anastacio Bracken, the transit cop who ruined Billy's life and shattered his crew back in 1987, is running for mayor. Only by rallying the forgotten writers of the eighties for an epic, game-changing mission can Billy and Dondi bring Bracken down. In this mind-bending journey through a subterranean world of epic heroes, villains, and eccentrics, Adam Mansbach balances an intricately plotted high-stakes caper with a wildly inventive tale of the time travel and shamanism, prodigal fathers and sons, and the hilariously intertwined realms of art, crime, and spirituality. Moving throughout New York City's unseen communities, from the tunnel camps of the Mole People to the drug dens of Crown Heights, Rage Is Back is a kaleidoscopic tour de force from a writer at the top of his game. 'An ambitious and immersive look into the New York graffiti scene. A finely detailed, richly colored work drawn with an artful hand.' Chuck Hogan, author of The Town 'A great, raucous ride-a lament for the hypocrisy of the present, as well as an ode to a lost NYC of the eighties, where street art and cultural chaos were in constant struggle against greed and corruption. The voice of the narrator-melancholy and hilarious, acerbic and wise-leaps out form page one, grabs you, and doesn't let go.' Danzy Senna, author of Caucasia 'A lush tale of time travel, mysticism, justice, the adventures of a boy and his dad-woven into the fabric of a bygone era in NYC. Fresh, compelling, and nostalgic all at once-a must for lovers of graf culture and those of us who lived it.' Pharoahe Monch

"All over the city on streets and walks and walls the children ... have established ancient, essential and ephemeral forms of art, have set forth in chalk and crayon the names and images of their pride, love, preying, scorn, desire. ... The Lady in this House is Nuts. ... Lois I have gone up the street. Don't forget to bring your skates. ... Ruby loves Max but Max hates Ruby. ... And drawings, all over, of ... ships, homes ... western heroes ... and monsters ... which each strong shower effaces."So wrote James Agee in 1939. He shared this fascination with children's street drawings and messages with his friend Helen Levitt. Here now are over one hundred of her photographs, made in the years between 1938 and 1948. Most of these pictures have never before been published. They have been selected and arranged by the photographer and carefully reproduced. Robert Coles has written especially for this book an essay on the imaginative live of children and of a time when ". . . children still had some visual independence, some keen-eyed interest in laying pictorial claim to the world around them. ... I have not seen scenes such as Helen Levitt offers in my wanderings through America's city streets twenty and thirty and forty years after these were taken. They offer, then, a look backward--though they are also timeless in certain aspects. For children will never really stop being tempted by their imaginative faculties to show and tell--to let others see what they find themselves conceiving in thought and fantasy and dream."