An official companion guide to the award-winning HBO series set against the backdrop of Baltimore journeys behind the scenes to examine the real-life people and events that inspired the show's gritty and realistic stories; offers a detailed overview of the show's first and second seasons; and furnishes a look at future seasons. 35,000 first printing.

The Wire: Truth Be Told

Humor & Entertainment

Alvarez, Rafael

Television

Pocket_Books

Widely regarded as one of the greatest television shows ever made, The Wire, often called a novel-as-television, is a Dickensian masterpiece that weaves together complex stories and complicated characters into a sprawling, textured portrait of an American city in decline. The Wire: Truth Be Told is the ultimate companion to this spectacular show. Essays from David Simon, George Pelecanos, Laura Lippman, William F. Zorzi, and others join interviews with the show’s creators, entertaining summaries of all sixty episodes and overviews of each of its seasons. Above all, The Wire: Truth Be Told offers a captivating behind the scenes look at the show, from the struggle to get it on the air, to the response from Baltimore’s residents and politicians, to the fascinating true stories and real life inspiration behind favorite scenes and characters. Lavishly illustrated with hundreds of photos, this is a must have book and a fitting guide to, and celebration of, a monumental show.

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

GROVE PRESS

The Fountain of Highlandtown: Stories

Literature & Fiction

Short Stories & Anthologies

Woodholm House Pub

Tales from the Holy Land is the third collection of short fiction from the Baltimore author and screenwriter. The stories take place along the narrow streets and alleys of Alvarez's heartbreaking hometown, charting secret histories of the last 100 years through the difficult and hopeful lives of tugboat men, junk collectors, beautiful women, short order cooks and an artist who captures it all in house paint on the sides of abandoned buildings.

Tales from the Holy Land

Genre Fiction

Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing

Don't Count Me Out chronicles the life of Bruce White from the beginning of his drug use in elementary school through criminal acts fueled by his need for drugs, to his miraculous recovery three decades later and involvement in the treatment of addicts, where he is now a leader in the rehabilitation field. 
Rafael Alvarez's recounting of White's journey should inspire those dealing with the fallout of addiction. Alvarez, a journalist and screenwriter, allows the reader to get inside the head of an addict who was stealing alcohol from his parents at the age of nine, selling drugs and tripping on LSD and PCP by the time he hit seventh grade, and hooked on morphine before he turned fifteen. "Bruce White? I thought he was dead?" is a response encountered in many of the interviews Alvarez conducted. 
Don't Count Me Out shines a spotlight on an improbable and stunning miracle. Though this is just one person's story, the contributing factors of early sexual assault, the role of permissive preoccupied parents, and the need for peer approval, among others, will resonate with many as the opioid crisis continues to haunt us.

Don't Count Me Out: A Baltimore Dope Fiend's Miraculous Recovery (The Culture and Politics of Health Care Work)

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Addiction & Recovery

ILR PRESS

THE WIRE has been widely hailed as the greatest television series of all time. It portrays the war of attrition between the city's hardened police force, and its drug dealers, and the blurring of good and evil, justice and injustice, right and wrong. Over its five series it has built up a detailed, rich and layered portrait of Baltimore: from its corner boys touting dope and its dock workers facing extinction, through the strained education system and tainted halls of power, to the crumbling media establishment. Rafael Alvarez - a reporter, essayist and staff writer for the show - brings the reader inside this world, detailing many of the real-life incidents and personalities that have inspired the show's storylines and characters. Packed with photographs and featuring an introduction by series creator and executive producer David Simon, as well as essays by acclaimed authors George Pelecanos, Nick Hornby, Laura Lipmann, and William F. Zorzi, it covers all five series in glorious detail.

Canongate Books Ltd.

Orlo and Leini

Woodholme House Pub

"Storyteller" combines Alvarez's intimate knowledge and fascination with the people and places of Baltimore, his own sense of personal history and his ability to make fact and fiction alike resonate with a poetic sense of the human condition. As Scott Shane states in the book's introduction, "All literature, like all politics, is local…..And it is from a long immersion in the newspaper facts of Baltimore and environs that Rafael Alvarez has begun to create his own rich ficitonal locale, the holy land of East Baltimore." 
Fiction and journalism blend in "Storyteller:" The three short stories in the "Something Made" section weave imaginary characters with the fine detail of real places. The ten chapters of "Newspaper Work," all originally published as articles in The Sun, weave real Baltimore profiles and scenes with Alvarez's mastery as a storyteller. The stories cover a couple with an informal ministry in the basement of their rowhouse floral shop, famous writers and musicians with Baltimore roots and "working-class heroes" – including a glassblower, a nightclub bouncer and a meat grinder. In addition to examining these and other examples of "Characterus Baltimorenis," Alvarez reveals his own rich heritage and shares his musings about life's journey as he travels cross-country with his teen-age son in summer 2000. "Storyteller" is not just for the Baltimore-familiar. Alvarez's ability to weave a tale and bring a story to colorful life is appreciated by all audiences of all ages.

Storyteller

History

Americas

Baltimore Sun

Commemorating the 20th anniversary of the publication of The Fountain of Highlandtown, this new collection of fiction from a master storyteller continues to mine the lives of Americans we rarely hear about. In Basilio Boullosa Stars in the Fountain of Highlandtown, Rafael Alvarez returns to his main theme of exile, the heartbreak of leaving and being left behind set to the sound track of the Beatles, Dylan, and Zappa. From the East Baltimore immigrants stirring the old country back to life in deep-bellied pots and cast iron skillets to the lovers stroking the relics of lost romance, Alvarez's characters yearn for the lost and struggle mightily to make memory as tangible as flesh. 
From National Book Award winner James McBride: "Rafael Alvarez's talents--poetic deftness, tight dialogue, burning descriptive passages laid out with seeming ease--show why he was one of the gifted writers that turned The Wire into the greatest show in television history. These are stories from the treasure chest of one of America's most talented scribes, and I am glad he shared them with us."
Published in 1997, The Fountain of Highlandtown heralded the fiction debut of a City Desk reporter for the Baltimore Sun who wanted to tell stories that would carry no expiration date. A late-night rewrite man, Alvarez used the rest of his time documenting the folklore of his hometown's neighborhoods. The practice imbued his short stories with a blue-collar honesty and kitchen-apron reality. Here is love in all of its pain and joy: love that Alvarez has for his city, that his characters have for one other, and that readers will have for these stories.
For the back cover of that first book, Stuart Dybek--author of Paper Lantern: Love Stories and The Coast of Chicago--said, "Rafael Alvarez's voice has already matured into a savvy, fleet prose style, and a pan-ethnic vision in which his allegiance, rather than to political correctness, is to integrity and vitality." It was twenty years ago today and the band is playing better than ever.
A lifelong Baltimorean, Alvarez began publishing poetry during the Ford Administration by rewriting the lyrics to Robin Trower songs. His early pieces appeared in the News-American--a defunct afternoon paper for the city's working class--and Chicory, a literary magazine published in Baltimore from 1966-to-1983. For twenty years, he worked as a City Desk reporter for the Baltimore Sun, specializing in the folklore of city neighborhoods. He quit the paper in 2001 to work as a laborer on cable ships and soon after began writing for HBO's police drama, The Wire.
Basilio Boullosa Stars in the Fountain of Highlandtown is Alvarez's fourth collection of fiction.

Basilio Boullosa Stars in the Fountain of Highlandtown

Literary

CityLit Press

"More than anything else this book is the story of a love affair-in this case the beloved is a city."Rafael Alvarez has no illusions about his city, he loves Baltimore despite its flaws, the violence, corruption and the pain. He so deeply appreciates and articulates its unique if heartbreaking beauty amidst the ruins of a prosperous and glamorous past as well as its vitality, resilience, poignant sense of dignity and community."Reading Alvarez's love story, I too began to see the city in a different light, wanting to know it better, even to live it." -Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

Crabtown, USA: Essays & Observations

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