Jerry Stahl

a memoir

Permanent midnight

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.

Perv--a Love Story

From Cocaine, the most troubling and fascinating of substances; through Speed, an oft demonized and misunderstood drug; and on to Heroin, long seen as the most 'literary' of narcotics - the contributors to this all-new original anthology reveal that those who partake are forever changed, but the price of paradise is often steep. The Hard Drug Chronicles runs to over 700 pages and contains more than 40 all new stories from Lee Child, Jerry Stahl, Ken Bruen, Laura Lippman, Nina Revoyr, James Franco, Sherman Alexie, William T. Vollmann, Megan Abbott, James Greer and more.

The Hard Drug Chronicles

Abandoned as a boy in Kansas, Fatty Arbuckle found adulation in Hollywood in the early days of cinema. During his heyday he was more popular than Charlie Chaplin and became the first screen actor to make a million dollars a year. But in 1921 Fatty was accused of the rape and murder of an actress he had met in San Francisco.

I, Fatty

Down-and-out ex-cop and not-quite-reformed addict Manny Rupert accepts an undercover job to find out if a California prison inmate is who he claims to be: Josef Mengele, aka the Angel of Death. Did the sadistic legend, whose Auschwitz crimes still horrify, fake his own death thirty years ago? Suddenly Manny finds himself in the middle of a conspiracy involving genocide, drugs, eugenics, human experiments, and America's secret history of collusion with the Nazis—all while careening from one extreme of apocalypse-adjacent reality to the other. Not for the faint of heart, Jerry Stahl's Pain Killers hurtles readers into a disturbing, original, and alarmingly real world filled with some of the strangest sex, most horrific violence, and screaming wit ever found on the page.

A Novel

Pain Killers

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.

Happy Mutant Baby Pills

"Down-and-out ex-cop and not-quite-reformed addict Manny Rupert accepts a job going undercover to find out if an old man locked up in a California prison is who he claims to be: the despicable - and allegedly dead - Josef Mengele, aka the Angel of Death.W

This collection of heroin stories from Eric Bogosian, Jerry Stahl, Lydia Lunch, and more “will satisfy devotees of noir fiction and outsider art alike” (Publishers Weekly). On the heels of The Speed Chronicles (Sherman Alexie, William T. Vollmann, Megan Abbott, James Franco, Beth Lisick, etc.) and The Cocaine Chronicles (Lee Child, Laura Lippman, etc.) comes The Heroin Chronicles, a volume sure to frighten and delight. The literary styles of these stories are as diverse as the moral quandaries they explore. From the groundbreaking novels of William S. Burroughs to the mind-altering music of The Velvet Underground, heroin—in all its ecstasy and tragedy—has been the subject of many an underground masterpiece. Collected here are all-new short stories about the infamous drug by some of today’s most celebrated and provocative writers, including Eric Bogosian, Lydia Lunch, Jerry Stahl, Nathan Larson, Ava Stander, Antonia Crane, Gary Phillips, Jervey Tervalon, John Albert, Michael Albo, Sophia Langdon, Tony O’Neill, and L.Z. Hansen.

The Heroin Chronicles

The author of Permanent Midnight and I, Fatty brings together bold, erotic short stories that probe the ins and outs of eccentric romance, midlife crisis, sex-starved adolescence, sexual obsession, and family dysfunction. Original.

Stories

Love Without

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 "Nein, Nein, Nein! is the unbelievable true story of a guided bus tour to Nazi concentration camps, told as only Jerry Stahl can tell it, with an acid wit as deadly serious as it is hilarious, insane, and weirdly life-affirming. The destinations he describes are real, but who else would dare to take us there? Stahl is fearless, gripping, and most unsparing about his own damned soul. I read everything he writes." —Eric Bogosian, actor/playwright "There’s dark humor, and then there is Nein, Nein, Nein! Jerry Stahl manages a balancing act here that would put all the trapeze artists of the world to shame." —Lucy Sante, author of Low Life "A disturbing, funny, dark travelogue." —Marc Maron 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.

One Man's Tale of Depression, Psychic Torment, and a Bus Tour of the Holocaust

Nein, Nein, Nein!

A searing confessional infused with the darkest humour, Permanent Midnight chronicles the opiated abyss of a Hollywood screenwriter and his formidable climb into society. Made into a major motion picture starring Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson, Permanent Midnight is revered by critics and an ever-growing cult of devoted readers as one of the most compelling contemporary memoirs. From the author of the hugely popular I, Fatty.

A Memoir

Permanent Midnight

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.

That most "literary" of narcotics - the enigmatic opium poppy and its various derivatives - and as these stories reveal, those who partake of the sacred flower are forever changed, but the price of paradise is often steep: overdose, hepatitis C, degradation and self-destruction. The editor, Jerry Stahl, himself a recovering addict with long-term sobriety, has assembled an impressive array of writers to create this 'encyclopedia of bad behaviour.' Indeed, these tales of chasing the dragon, with corollaries often violent and savage, will satisfy devotees of noir fiction and outsider art alike.

Jerry Stahl

About

Books

Join the club