Evan Hughes

The blistering inside story of a startup that made millions pushing opioids--until its cutthroat tactics were exposed and its executives put behind bars John Kapoor had amassed a small fortune in pharmaceuticals when he conceived of a new product. It was the 2000s, and opioids were big business. If Kapoor, an immigrant and the billionaire founder of Insys, could find a new way to administer the highly potent fentanyl, he could patent his invention and sell it to those in need--at a steep price. The only problem: There weren't enough people in need. Kapoor's drug was approved for breakthrough cancer pain. If Subsys was going to turn a profit, the company would need to persuade doctors to prescribe it "off-label," for other, lesser forms of pain. This is the story of how Insys turned a niche drug into big business. With executives leading the charge, Insys sales reps seduced doctors with charm, money, and sex. Its administrators lied to health care providers, claiming recipients had cancer when they did not. It pushed drugs onto patients that would have benefited from safer options, or no drugs at all. The strategy worked: When Insys went public, it notched the biggest IPO of its year. But several employees reached their limit and quietly blew the whistle, bringing the full force of the justice system upon the drug maker. In The Hard Sell, author and National Magazine Award-finalist Evan Hughes lays bare the pharma playbook. He shows how drug makers like Insys, fueled by greed and a hunger for market share, turn deception into profit. The book represents a stunning vindication, but also a cautionary tale. As Hughes shows, Insys didn't do anything its competitors weren't also doing. It was simply worse at covering its tracks.

Crime and Punishment at an Opioid Startup

The Hard Sell

For the first time, here is Brooklyn's story through the eyes of its greatest storytellers. Like Paris in the twenties or postwar Greenwich Village, Brooklyn today is experiencing an extraordinary cultural boom. In recent years, writers of all stripes—from Jhumpa Lahiri, Jennifer Egan, and Colson Whitehead to Nicole Krauss and Jonathan Safran Foer—have flocked to its patchwork of distinctive neighborhoods. But as literary critic and journalist Evan Hughes reveals, the rich literary life now flourishing in Brooklyn is part of a larger, fascinating history. With a dynamic mix of literary biography and urban history, Hughes takes us on a tour of Brooklyn past and present and reveals that hiding in Walt Whitman's Fort Greene Park, Hart Crane's Brooklyn Bridge, the raw Williamsburg of Henry Miller's youth, Truman Capote's famed house on Willow Street, and the contested streets of Jonathan Lethem's Boerum Hill is the story of more than a century of life in America's cities. Literary Brooklyn is a prismatic investigation into a rich literary inheritance, but most of all it's a deep look into the beloved borough, a place as diverse and captivating as the people who walk its streets and write its stories.

Evan Hughes

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