Don Winslow In Conversation With Pulitzer-Prize Winning Playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis Tonight At The Strand

- Tonight, 2/26 @ The Strand

Following his major profile on CBS Sunday Morning, front-page features in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, and glowing reviews in the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post, Winslow will hit 13 cities on a national book tour, with appearances on national television and radio, and features in 75 other major publications; With major op-eds and tweets regularly broadcast by Stephen King to over 5 million followers, Winslow has become one of the nation's most prominent voices opposing President Trump's policies on drugs, incarceration, and immigration, as well as the separation of families seeking asylum, and the proposed border wall.

Don Winslow will conclude the New York Times bestselling Cartel Trilogy, which began in 2005 with The Power of the Dog and continued in 2015 with the breakout book The Cartel with the highly-anticipated publication of THE BORDER on February 26, 2019. The landmark trilogy, called "this generation's defining work of American mass-culture storytelling on the border; a hybrid of The Godfather and War and Peace" by the New York Times, has made Winslow not only an international bestseller, but also a central figure in the national debate over border security, the handling of migrant children, the opioid crisis, and the influence of foreign money on the highest levels of U.S. government.

"Winslow is respected not only as the author of 19 novels," writes the Houston Chronicle in a recent feature, "but as a journalist who has been researching and writing about the war on drugs and the border for decades. Cops actually come to him for clarification."

Winslow recently led Jeff Glor on a personal tour of the border on a recent edition of CBS Sunday Morning, the #1 Sunday morning news show in America. "There is no invasion of the United States through this border," Winslow said. "These are not armed people. These are people, for the most part, hard-working, family people trying to find a better life, something we used to welcome in this country."

Readers around the world have been counting down the days until the book's publication - at one point, all three books in the trilogy were ranked in the overall Top 20 on Amazon, a feat virtually unprecedented for adult fiction. The first two books are currently out of stock, leaving the publisher scrambling to print more.

The Wall Street Journal calls THE BORDER "grand in scope, audacious in its political portraits, convincing in its socio-economic arguments and humane to the core. Not only a formidable thriller but an important and provocative book." Winslow's protagonist Art Keller has become director of the DEA and launches "an investigation that's spread from the poppy fields of Mexico to Wall Street to the White House itself."

"The path he takes," Winslow told Entertainment Weekly, "takes him deeper into conflict with the powers-that-be in Washington." That conflict is mirrored in real life with Winslow's own public criticism of Donald Trump and his policies. "The current political climate is the heart of the book. I wanted to show how a corrupt and venal political climate is directly related to the heroin epidemic, mass incarceration, the disgrace of our immigration policies. Drug trafficking is about the border, immigration is about the border, the political conflict is about the border."

Winslow first criticized Trump on a national level with a full-page ad in the New York Times, and that criticism has grown in volume with several opinion pieces in major publications such as Vanity Fair, Esquire, and Vulture, in profiles and interviews in the Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, and Entertainment Weekly, and on national television networks such as CBS and CNN. In a recent major three-part op-ed series in the San Diego Union-Tribune, Winslow explains that "the proposed border wall would only make life difficult for the smaller operators and force them into the hands of the large organizations, increasing their income and power. The wall would not cost the cartels money, it would make them more money."

"While we in the U.S. have the nerve to scream about drugs and violence coming from Mexico," Winslow writes in the series' final op-ed, "it's our drug users who fund massive violence on the other side of the border. It's not Mexico that's invading the U.S., it's the U.S. that's invading Mexico."

On Twitter, where he has over 50,000 followers, Winslow directly challenged President Trump to a debate on the wall: "You debated 18 Republicans during your Presidential campaign, I am sure you can handle one writer. Let me know." Stephen King saw the tweet and sent out his own tweet to his 5 million followers. So far, there has been no response from the White House.

Winslow's national book tour will include stops in New York City, Philadelphia, Washington, DC, Phoenix, and Los Angeles. In a review on the front page of the New York Times, Janet Maslin called The Border "stunning and timely," and Booklist called it "a landmark in crime fiction." The Arizona Republic called the entire trilogy "quite simply the most important crime saga in modern literature."

The Cartel Trilogy is currently in film development at Twentieth Century Fox, with Ridley Scott (Gladiator, The Martian, Black Hawk Down) after Fox bought the rights in a headline-grabbing $6 million deal.