Sign-In
Cart
Barless: A Bronx Memoir
Paperback
Biographies GeneralGeneral ParentingGeneral Sociology
Publisher: Barless Press
Published: Jul 30 2026
Pages: 302
Weight: 0.66
Height: 0.68 Width: 5.00 Depth: 8.00
Language: English
BARLESS: A Bronx Memoir
A raw, unsparing memoir of hunger, abandonment, and improvised family - told entirely in the voice of the boy who lived it.
Anthony Aleman was eleven, alone for days at a stretch on the fourteenth floor of a South Bronx tower, when he learned to stage his own apartment for the social worker: shovel out the dog waste, swallow toothpaste so his breath was clean, line the cabinets with cans no one was allowed to open. He was protecting his mother - a woman who had loved him once, and who was disappearing inch by inch behind a man, a drug, and a thing the boy could only name the Rot.
BARLESS is the account of the years that followed, written without hindsight and without mercy. In the flat present tense of a child who was never taught what he was supposed to feel, Aleman records a body burned in a stairwell, a father he meets just in time to watch him die, a high school with metal detectors and razor blades, foster placements and group homes, and a mother who walks past him on the street for three years without ever looking up.
And on a stoop across from the tower that erased him: a family that owed him nothing, teaching him to fight, to dance, to be Puerto Rican, to be loved.
From the crack-war Bronx to a hundred acres of Florida green to a convent in Syracuse, this is not a story about being saved. It is the record of a boy building a self out of whatever the street handed him.
He spent that childhood on a fourteenth-story windowsill with no bars on it. Nothing holding him in. Nobody there to catch him. He would escape one place after another before learning that a cage doesn't need bars.
What does a child become when nobody ever comes?
Also in
Biographies General
Bluesland: Portraits of Thirteen Major American Blues Masters
Pete Welding (ED.)
Toby Byron (ED.)
Hardcover
Karl Popper - The Formative Years, 1902 1945: Politics and Philosophy in Interwar Vienna
Hacohen, Malachi Haim
Hardcover
The Children of Athena: Greek Intellectuals in the Age of Rome: 150 Bc0-400 AD
Freeman, Charles
Hardcover
Make It a Double: From Wretched to Wondrous: Tales of One Woman's Lifelong Discovery of Whisky
Sackier, Shelley
Hardcover
The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race
Isaacson, Walter
Hardcover
An Enemy Such as This: Larry Casuse and the Fight for Native Liberation in One Family on Two Continents Over Three Centuries
Correia, David
Hardcover
Agents of Chaos: Thomas King Forçade, High Times, and the Paranoid End of the 1970s
Howe, Sean
Hardcover
Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
Cooper, Christian
Hardcover
The Secret Life of the Savoy: Glamour and Intrigue at the World's Most Famous Hotel
Williams, Olivia
Paperback
The Badger: The Life of Bernard Hinault and the Legacy of French Cycling
Fotheringham, William
Paperback
Florence Kelley and the Nation's Work: The Rise of Womens Political Culture, 1830-1900
Sklar, Kathryn Kish
Paperback
The Devil's Diary: Alfred Rosenberg and the Stolen Secrets of the Third Reich
Wittman, Robert K.
Kinney, David
Paperback
A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II
Purnell, Sonia
Hardcover
Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything
Ehrenreich, Barbara
Paperback
Seafaring Women: Adventures of Pirate Queens, Female Stowaways, and Sailors' Wives
Cordingly, David
Paperback
The Butcher, the Embezzler, and the Fall Guy: A Family Memoir of Scandal and Greed in the Meat Industry
Cherington, Gretchen
Paperback
My Own Devices: True Stories from the Road on Music, Science, and Senseless Love
Dessa Wander
Hardcover
Nobody's Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice
Giuffre, Virginia Roberts
Hardcover
How to Be Okay When Nothing Is Okay: Tips and Tricks That Kept Me Alive, Happy, and Creative in Spite of Myself
Lawson, Jenny
Hardcover
Family of Spies: A World War II Story of Nazi Espionage, Betrayal, and the Secret History Behind Pearl Harbor
Kuehn, Christine
Hardcover
Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground
Dohrn, Zayd Ayers
Hardcover
A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon
Fedarko, Kevin
Paperback
Catch the Devil: A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast
Colloff, Pamela
Hardcover