Hole In My Life

Jack Gantos, bestselling author of the Joey Pigza books, had a peripatetic childhood around the US and the Caribbean. At 18 years old, he was doing a dead-end job on a Caribbean island, looking for adventure and a way to fund himself through university. When he was offered $10,000 to sail a boatload of drugs to New York, he jumped at it. It resulted in a year in a federal prison - and a lot of thinking time. In prison, Jack discovered the library where he was able to indulge his passion for literature and continue to write the journal he'd started in childhood. Denied a diary of his own by prison regulations, he wrote his notes in a tiny hand between the lines of a Russian novel. Becoming ever more determined to get to university, Jack discovered that he didn't have to let one bad choice map out the course of the rest of his life. There are such things as second chances. Paroled after a year in order to go directly to college to study writing, Jack had his first children's book published within two years of being released.

Hole in My Life

JACK GANTOS

Teen & Young Adult

Red Fox

What Would Joey Do? (Lib)(CD)

Listening Library

In the summer of 1971, Jack Gantos was an aspiring author desperate for adventure, college cash, and a way out of a dead-end job. For ten thousand dollars, he recklessly agreed to help sail a sixty-foot yacht loaded with hashish from the Virgin Islands to New York City, where he and his partners sold the drug until federal agents finally caught up with them in a bust at the Chelsea Hotel. For his part in the conspiracy, the twenty-year-old Gantos was sentenced to serve up to six years in a federal prison. In Hole in My Life, this prizewinning author of over thirty books for young people confronts the period of struggle an confinement that marked the end of his own youth. On the surface, the narrative tumbles from one crazed moment to the next as Gantos pieces together the story of his restless final year of high school, his short-lived career as a criminal, and his time in prison. But running just beneath the action is the story of how Gantos once he was locked up in a small, yellow-walled cell moved from wanting to be a writer to writing, and how his new found dedication helped him endure the worst experience of his life.

Hole in My Life (Lib)(CD)

Dead End In Norvelt

Farrar. Straus & Giroux

newbery honor book. scholastic 1st printing.

Joey Pigza Loses Control

Scholastic Press

Joey is a good kid, maybe even a great kid, but his teachers never know what he's going to do next. He sharpens his finger in the pencil-sharpener and swallows his house key. He can't sit still for more than a minute - Joey is buzzing! Told from Joey's own unique viewpoint by acclaimed American author Jack Gantos, this is an exceptionally funny and touching story about a boy with severe attention deficit disorder (ADD).

Joey Pigza Swallowed the Key

Corgi Books

The waiting is over for Joey Pigza fans! In this brilliant third book Joey is attempting a breath-taking balancing act as he tries to keep a handle on his wild, wired behaviour without letting his hyperactively helpful ways spin him out of control - again. Joey is being home-schooled alongside Olivia, a really sneaky, annoying girl, who is blind. He's still living with his mum and grandma, who is now dying, but his dad is also around - roaring past on his motorbike from time to time-

What Would Joey Do?

Neal Layton

I Am Not Joey Pigza

Random House Childs Paperbacks

Dead End in Norvelt Jack's summer has hit a dead end . . .After being 'grounded for life', Jack is facing a summer of doing nothing. But who's got time to die of boredom when there are so many more interesting ways to die in this town?He might crash in his Dad's homemade plane, or catch the disease that makes you dance yourself to death, or fall foul of the motorcycle gang that wants to burn the town to the ground. Old people seem to be dying faster than Miss Walker can write their obituaries, and Jack is starting to worry that it might not just be the rats that are eating the rat poison . . .Dead End in Norvelt is Jack Gantos's hilarious blend of the entirely true and the wildly fictional, from one of the most darkly amusing imaginations writing today.

Dead End

Literature & Fiction

Humor & Satire

Corgi Yearling

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by JACK GANTOS. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by JACK GANTOS