Black vendre Cracker by Josh Alan Friedman NEUF

South School, 1962: The last segregated school in New York. Their teacher moonlights on "Lawrence Welk," the lady principal wears boxing gloves, and the student body is all-Negro . . . except for first grader Josh Friedman. Hes white, but hes working on it.

The acclaimed author of TELL THE TRUTH UNTIL THEY BLEED and TALES OF TIMES SQUARE returns with a one-of-a-kind autobiographical novel - "a memoir you cant accuse of lies." Center stage in the unflinching and frequently hilarious funhouse tour of Friedmans Long Island boyhood is a rogues gallery that includes Bobo, precocious third-grade dropout and boy prince of the ghetto; his bumbling (and alarmingly potent) neer-do-well Uncle Limpy; Mumsy, the smelliest shoeshine boy in Penn Station; Mrs. OLeary, the menacing Irish nanny; her son, Drake, an etiquette-obsessed, switchblade-totin clammer overwhelmed by the tides of racial progress; and the impoverished Wilshires, the bone-white, nigger-hatin-est crackers in town.

At once heartbreaking and hysterically funny, BLACK CRACKER delivers a fearless account of adventures in the now-forgotten poor Black shantytowns of Long Island, exploring the singular ugliness of racism, the intrigue of janitorial whodunits, the tragic limits vendre of friendship, and the inexplicable seductive powers of croco-print footwear.