This anthology -- the first general-reader collection of writing by Italian American authors -- is part manifesto, part Sunday dinner. A gathering of voices old and new, some speak in the accents of another age, some completely contemporary and assured, and all together for the first time. To stand with all the other popular media images we represent, now, at last, one exists in written form, the literature of Italian American life.
Inside, there are excerpts from novels, memoirs, short stories, essays, and poems -- by the living and the dead, the famous and the obscure. The excerpts...
This anthology -- the first general-reader collection of writing by Italian American authors -- is part manifesto, part Sunday dinner. A gathering ...
Flamboyant mobster Arnold Rothstein was gambling and money. He was the inspiration for Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby and Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls. It was rumored he masterminded the 1919 World Series fix. He was Mr. Broadway, a king of corruption holding court from his private booth at Lindy's Restaurant.
In this lively, sprawling biography, the inimitable Nick Tosches -- "one of the greatest living American writers" (Dallas Observer) -- examines the myth and extraordinary legacy of Arnold Rothstein. It is an elegy to old New York that places...
Flamboyant mobster Arnold Rothstein was gambling and money. He was the inspiration for Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby and Nathan Detr...
Celebrating the dark origins of our most American music, Country reveals a wild shadowland of history that encompasses blackface minstrels and yodeling cowboys; honky-tonk hell and rockabilly heaven; medieval myth and musical miscegenation; sex, drugs, murder; and rays of fierce illumination on Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, and others, famous and forgotten, whose demonology is America's own. Profusely and superbly illustrated, Country stands as one of the most brilliant explorations of American musical culture ever written.
Celebrating the dark origins of our most American music, Country reveals a wild shadowland of history that encompasses blackface minstrels and ...
Long before Elvis Presley entered Sam Phillips's Sun Records studio in 1954, rock 'n' roll was being performed and recorded by the likes of Big Joe Turner, Louis Jordan, Wynonie Harris, the Clovers, the Dominoes, the Midnighters, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, Wanda Jackson, and Johnny Ace. More than just a series of shrewd and evocative portraits of these and sixteen other performers, this book is also a paean to a forsaken time of relentless excess, sudden ruin, and fierce music. For this edition, the author has contributed a new listing of recent CD reissues. From 1945 to 1955, from Chinese...
Long before Elvis Presley entered Sam Phillips's Sun Records studio in 1954, rock 'n' roll was being performed and recorded by the likes of Big Joe Tu...
Newsday has said that Nick Tosches "casts brilliant black light." The San Diego Reader has said that "Tosches's best sentences uncoil like rattlesnakes and strike with a venom that spreads poison through all the little Sunday-school ideas you've held dear." And Rolling Stone has said that "Tosches can write like a wild rockabilly raveup. He can be elegant as a slow blues." The Nick Tosches Reader is the author's own selection of his best work over the past thirty years, including fiction, poetry, interviews, rock writing, investigative journalism, and criticism....
Newsday has said that Nick Tosches "casts brilliant black light." The San Diego Reader has said that "Tosches's best sentences uncoil li...
A forgotten singer from the early days of jazz is at the center of this riveting book--a narrative that is part mystery, part biography, part meditation on the meaning and power of music.
A forgotten singer from the early days of jazz is at the center of this riveting book--a narrative that is part mystery, part biography, part meditati...
From dealing blackjack in the small-time gangster town of Steubenville, Ohio, to carousing with the famous "Rat Pack" in a Hollywood he called home, Dean Martin lived in a grandstand, guttering life of booze, broads, and big money. He rubbed shoulders with the mob, the Kennedys, and Hollywood's biggest stars. He was one of America's favorite entertainers. But no one really knew him. Now Nick Tosches reveals the man behind the image--the dark side of the American dream. It's a wild, illuminating, sometimes shocking tale of sex, ambition, heartaches--and a life lived hard, fast, and without...
From dealing blackjack in the small-time gangster town of Steubenville, Ohio, to carousing with the famous "Rat Pack" in a Hollywood he called home, D...
In 1962, Sonny Liston became boxing's world heavyweight champion. He was a poor plantation boy and a bruiser for the mob who had done time for armed robbery, but he had fought his way to the top. Those he met in the ring said he was unstoppable, even dangerous. Sonny, however, knew differently.
In 1962, Sonny Liston became boxing's world heavyweight champion. He was a poor plantation boy and a bruiser for the mob who had done time for armed r...
