Books by Jerry Stahl
I, Fatty: A Novel
by Jerry Stahl
In this highly acclaimed novel, the author of Permanent Midnight channels fallen early-Hollywood star Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle. Fatty tells his own story of success, addiction, and a precipitous fall from grace after being framed for a brutal crime-a national media scandal that set the precedent for those so familiar today.
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Perv--a Love Story
by Jerry Stahl
Set in 1970, in the last, dark days of hippiedom, Perv -- A Love Story is the saga of Bobby Stark, a sixteen-year-old batch of desire and angst struggling to stay sane in a world gone Day-Glo.
As the novel opens, Bobby loses his virginity in a drug-addled tryst with a one-armed barber's daughter. For his sins he's thrown out of school and dispatched to live with his mom, a festive electro shock aficionado, whose condo he flees to track down Michelle, the gorgeously damaged, lasped Hare Krishna-ette he's adored since kindergarten.
Like the rest of their generation, the couple hit the road for California, only to be picked up in a hell-fueled Lincoln by a pair of Bad Hippies -- Meat and Varnish -- smacked-out spiritual cousins to Charles Manson. From here the trip gets vicious....
Already an underground classic, Perv-A Love Story is relentlessly twisted, sexy, and savagely funny literary excursion, a novel of doomed youth in the era when Flower Power had begun to wilt.
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Old Guy Dad: Weird Shit Happens When You Don't Die Young
by Jerry Stahl
Old Guy Dad recounts the adventures of a man who, in the autumn of his years—or at least the pre-autumn—discovers his girlfriend is pregnant. He is going to be a father. Again. Only this time he wants to do it right: no heroin, plenty of low-back pain.
A collection of celebrated columns from The Rumpus with new material and never-before-told tales, OG Dad finds Jerry Stahl fighting a terminal disease—not to mention mortality, sleeplessness, and the soul-crushing weirdness of preschool drop-offs with parents half his age. Square is the last frontier.
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Nein, Nein, Nein!: One Man's Tale of Depression, Psychic Torment, and a Bus Tour of the Holocaust
by Jerry Stahl
A guided group tour to concentration camps in Poland and Germany allows Stahl to confront personal and historical demons with both deep despair and savage humor.
"Gonzo meets the Shoah in this wildly irreverent―and brilliant―tour of Holocaust tourism . . . Stahl knows his Holocaust history . . . but he was also prepared to be surprised . . . A vivid, potent, decidedly idiosyncratic addition to the literature of genocide."
―Kirkus Reviews, a Best Nonfiction Book of 2022
"Stahl embarks on Holocaust tourism in this meditative yet humorous account, weaving personal narrative with reflections on current and past global events."
―New York Times Book Review
In September 2016, Jerry Stahl was feeling nervous on the eve of a two-week trip across Poland and Germany. But it was not just the stops at Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Dachau that gave him anxiety. It was the fact that he would be traveling with two dozen strangers, by bus. In a tour group. And he was not a tour-group kind of guy.
The decision to visit Holocaust-world did not come easy. Stahl’s lifelong depression at an all-time high, his career and personal life at an all-time low, he had the idea to go on a trip where the despair he was feeling―out-of- control sadness, regret, and fear, not just for himself, but for the entire United States―would be appropriate. And where was despair more appropriate than the land of the Six Million?
Seamlessly weaving global and personal history, through the lens of Stahl’s own bent perspective, Nein, Nein, Nein! stands out as a triumph of strange-o reporting, a tale that takes us from gang polkas to tour-rash to the truly disturbing snack bar at Auschwitz. Strap in for a raw, surreal, and redemptively hilarious trip. Get on the bus.
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Open City #22: Fiction/Nonfiction
by Jerry Stahl, Vestal McIntyre, Sam Lipsyte, Leni Zumas, Vince Passaro, Open City Magazine, Jonathan Baumbach, Herbert Gold, Jocko Weyland, Priscilla Becker
A literary magazine of fiction, poetry, and artwork, Open City has a youthful, adventurous spirit and an uncanny knack for finding vibrant and original voices. It’s a rare cultural phenomenon: a literary journal that entices readers and writers from each new generation, and makes people genuinely excited about literature and the thrill of discovering something fresh. Open City #22, a special double-sided fiction/nonfiction issue, features writing by Sam Lipsyte, Edmund White, Stanley Crouch, Priscilla Becker, Matthew Kirby, Ann Hillesland, and a stunning fiction debut by Suhay Rosario.
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Happy Mutant Baby Pills: A Novel
by Jerry Stahl
Lloyd has a particular set of skills. He writes the small print for prescription drugs, marital aids, and incontinence products. The clients present him with a list of possible side effects. His job is "to recite and minimize"—sometimes by just saying them really fast and other times by finding the language that can render them acceptable. The results are ingenious. The methods diabolical.
Lloyd has a habit, too. He cops smack during coffee breaks at his new job writing copy for Christian Swingles, an online dating service for the faithful. He finds a precarious balance between hackwork and heroin until he encounters Nora, a mysterious and troubled young woman, a Sylvia Plath with tattoos and implants, who asks for his help.
Lloyd falls swiftly in love, but Nora bestows her affections at a cost. Before Lloyd clears his head from the fog of romance, he finds himself complicit in Nora's grand scheme to horrify the world and exact revenge on those who poison the populace in order to sell them the cure.
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