“A RIVETING AND MASTERFUL URBAN NARRATIVE” - LOS ANGELES TIMES
“A WORK OF ALMOST UNERRING TENDERNESS” - NEW YORK TIMES
“SEARING” - KIRKUS (STARRED)
“WHOLLY TRANSFORMATIVE” - BOOKLIST (STARRED)
“RELENTLESS” - SHELF AWARENESS
A LIT HUB “MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK” OF 2024
With The Rent Collectors, Jesse Katz has produced a deeply reported portrait of Los Angeles at its most complex and precarious. It’s the story of a street gang that charges “rent” to the largely undocumented vendors eking out a living on LA’s sidewalks, the city that has long harassed, fined, and even arrested those vendors, and a prison mafia that takes its own cut of the gang’s revenues.
“A LANDMARK OF TRUE-CRIME REPORTING ABOUT THE CITY THAT HELPED GIVE BIRTH TO THE GENRE, LOS ANGELES”
— Héctor Tobar, bestselling author of Deep Down Dark and Our Migrant Souls
“KATZ … ELEVATES THIS STORY INTO THE CLASSIC REALM OF GREAT HUMAN DRAMA FROM DOSTOYEVSKY TO MAILER”
— T.J. English, bestselling author of The Westies, Havana Nocturne, and Dangerous Rhythms
“FOR LONGER THAN SEEMS HUMANLY POSSIBLE, JESSE KATZ HAS BEEN ONE OF OUR GREATEST CHRONICLERS OF LA’S STREET UNDERWORLD”
— Sam Quinones, bestselling author of Dreamland and The Least of Us
“THIS IS URBAN REPORTAGE AT ITS FINEST AND MOST HUMAN”
— Gregory Boyle, author of Tattoos on The Heart and founder of Homeboy Industries
CHAPTER 1
WHEN AT LAST HE OPENED HIS EYES, IT WAS BECAUSE HE WAS FALLING. THAT MEANT HE WASN’T DEAD, NOT YET. THE EARTH BELOW GIOVANNI WAS LIKE CINDER, SLICK FROM AN OVERNIGHT MIST AND STEEP AS A WINDSWEPT DUNE. WITH EACH FLINCH OF HIS BODY, THE SLOPE LOOSED BENEATH HIM—A HISS OF SHALE, A RUSH OF GRAVEL—PROPELLING HIM DOWNWARD.
A ribbon of lavender broke the darkness, revealing the day’s first glimpse of La Rumorosa, the coil of borderland highway that writhes around the Sierra de Juárez, halfway between Tijuana and Mexicali. The gusts that moan through the rusted canyons and granite crags have given La Rumorosa its name: the Whispering Woman. In the span of fourteen miles, Carretera 2D twists more than seventy times, corkscrewing as it plunges four thousand feet from shrouded mountaintop to swirling sands. La Rumorosa is a gash in the Baja desert, a white-knuckle trek and a dumping ground. Mythologized in ghost stories and second-guessed by safety engineers, the passage stirs primordial awe—a “forgotten planet,” the Mexican poet Adolfo Sagastume calls La Rumorosa, a “silent uterus.” A city boy, Los Angeles born, Giovanni had never heard of the place. Now it was swallowing him.
Flailing his arms, pawing at dust, Giovanni felt the scrape of chaparral. He wrapped a hand around a gnarled root. It broke his slide. For a moment he was suspended, the cliff still once more. Blinking away the fog, Giovanni tried to make out the road above him; too high to see. Below, the gorge looked bottomless. He realized then that his shoes were gone, the black-suede Jordans he’d bought with the check from his first honest job. Only socks covered his feet. He stared at his shirt, a white tee with the curly Sean John logo, now stained with vomit. Blood, too, had soiled the cotton. His neck throbbed, so much he could barely turn his head. The skin burned. He thought maybe he’d been shot, until he touched a finger to his throat. A collar of torn flesh, pulpy and raw, branded his windpipe. That was where the rope had seared him, where his killers, before tossing him over the edge, had cinched it tight, yanking like some soul-snatching repo men.
Now he remembered.
ABOUT JESSE
In one way or another, I’ve been preparing my whole life to write The Rent Collectors. My book explores issues that have fascinated me for nearly four decades: gang culture, prison life, street vending, and the principle that our society should be judged not by how we treat the affluent and powerful but the poor and marginalized. My GQ story about the incarcerated runners of the San Quentin Marathon, “26.2 to Life,” was anthologized in Best American Sports Writing. My Los Angeles magazine piece about a taco truck in East LA, “Wheels of Fortune,” received the James Beard Foundation’s M.F.K. Fisher Distinguished Writing Award. And my portrait of the academic decathlon team from Jordan High School in Watts, “The Test of Their Lives,” earned PEN Center USA’s Literary Journalism Award. As a staff writer at the Los Angeles Times in the 1980s and ’90s, I was also a Pulitzer Prize finalist for my coverage of LA gangs, and I shared in two Pulitzers for breaking news awarded to the Metro staff.
My first book, The Opposite Field, a memoir set in the immigrant suburb of Monterey Park, was called “deeply human” by D.J. Waldie (Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir). Michael Connelly (Bosch, Lincoln Lawyer) said, “Jesse Katz delivers the human experience in a way that speaks to us all.” And former Los Angeles poet laureate Luis J. Rodriguez (Always Running: La Vida Loca) added: “Katz may be the next big writer dude of the LA style.”
For more on that book and my previous stories, please visit byjessekatz.com.