Marc Weingarten

Traces the evolution of a literary form of journalism within the context of the history of America since the end of the Second World War, offering incisive profiles of such gifted writers as John Hershey, Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson, and Joan Didion in terms of their lasting influence on American journalism and cultural life. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.

Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote & the New Journalism Revolution

The Gang that Wouldn't Write Straight

Jeff Gordinier

Whether it was Patti Smith's angry moan, Nina Simone's guttural growl, or Dolly Parton's towering hair and sweet voice, women have been a musical force to be reckoned with, inspired by, and paid attention to. InHere She Comes Now, today's biggest and brightest writers tackle their favorite female musicians and the effect they've had on their own lives. From Rosie Schaap writing about Sandy Denny to Susan Choi writing about Stevie Nicks to Elissa Schappell writing about Kim Gordon, Here She Comes Now thoughtfully and lovingly discusses the extreme badassery of the women who break through all the barriers to truly rock.

Women in Music Who Have Changed Our Lives

Here She Comes Now

. . . In Cold Blood, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The Armies of the Night . . . Starting in 1965 and spanning a ten-year period, a group of writers including Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion, John Sack, and Michael Herr emerged and joined a few of their pioneering elders, including Truman Capote and Norman Mailer, to remake American letters. The perfect chroniclers of an age of frenzied cultural change, they were blessed with the insight that traditional tools of reporting would prove inadequate to tell the story of a nation manically hopscotching from hope to doom and back again—from war to rock, assassination to drugs, hippies to Yippies, Kennedy to the dark lord Nixon. Traditional just-the-facts reporting simply couldn’t provide a neat and symmetrical order to this chaos. Marc Weingarten has interviewed many of the major players to provide a startling behind-the-scenes account of the rise and fall of the most revolutionary literary outpouring of the postwar era, set against the backdrop of some of the most turbulent—and significant—years in contemporary American life. These are the stories behind those stories, from Tom Wolfe’s white-suited adventures in the counterculture to Hunter S. Thompson’s drug-addled invention of gonzo to Michael Herr’s redefinition of war reporting in the hell of Vietnam. Weingarten also tells the deeper backstory, recounting the rich and surprising history of the editors and the magazines who made the movement possible, notably the three greatest editors of the era—Harold Hayes at Esquire, Clay Felker at New York, and Jann Wenner at Rolling Stone. And finally Weingarten takes us through the demise of the New Journalists, a tragedy of hubris, miscalculation, and corporate menacing. This is the story of perhaps the last great good time in American journalism, a time when writers didn’t just cover stories but immersed themselves in them, and when journalism didn’t just report America but reshaped it. “Within a seven-year period, a group of writers emerged, seemingly out of nowhere—Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion, John Sack, Michael Herr—to impose some order on all of this American mayhem, each in his or her own distinctive manner (a few old hands, like Truman Capote and Norman Mailer, chipped in, as well). They came to tell us stories about ourselves in ways that we couldn’t, stories about the way life was being lived in the sixties and seventies and what it all meant to us. The stakes were high; deep fissures were rending the social fabric, the world was out of order. So they became our master explainers, our town criers, even our moral conscience—the New Journalists.” —from the Introduction

Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution

The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight

Based on comprehensive research and interviews, this book profiles such astonishingly gifted writers as Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe, who became the romantic heroes of their own tales, changing journalism and American cultural life forever. High school & older.

Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, and the New Journalism Revolution

Tyson Cornell

Progressive rock is maligned and misunderstood. Critics hate it. Hipsters scoff at it. Yes Is The Answer is a pointed rebuke to the prog-haters, the first literary collection devoted to the sub-genre. Featuring acclaimed novelists Rick Moody, Wesley Stace, Seth Greenland, Charles Bock, and Joe Meno, as well as musicians Nathan Larson, and Peter Case, Yes Is The Answer is a book that dares to reclaim prog-rock as a subject worthy of serious consideration.

Yes Is the Answer: (and Other Prog-Rock Tales)

Collects essays discussing the subgenre of progressive rock by such novelists as Rick Moody, Wesley Stace, and Seth Greenland and such musicians as Matthew Sweet, Nathan Larson, and Peter Case.

And Other Prog Rock Tales

Yes is the Answer

Progressive rock is maligned and misunderstood. Critics hate it. Hipsters scoff at it. A topographic journey into a 21st-century schizoid land of prog-lit, Yes Is the Answer is a pointed rebuke to the prog-haters and the first literary anthology devoted to the subgenre. Featuring acclaimed novelists Rick Moody, Wesley Stace, Seth Greenland, Charles Bock, and Joe Meno, as well as musicians Nathan Larson and Peter Case, Yes Is the Answer is the first book that dares to thoughtfully reclaim prog-rock as a subject worthy of serious consideration.

Yes Is the Answer

Thirsty

The list of classic works of New Journalism goes on and on: In Cold Blood, The Right Stuff, Armies of the Night, Dispatches, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hiroshima, Slouching Towards Bethlehem: not only are they all still in print after 40 years, but also as accepted classics. Their authors - Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe, Michael Herr, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer - are also acknowledged as some of America's greatest twentieth-century writers. But they wrote non-fiction, not novels, about big subjects like Vietnam, the Hippie culture, notorious murders, the space programme. And the then revolutionary new brand of non-fiction they pioneered - narrative and novelistic, yet documentary and often with a spacedout, forensic detachment - has now become so much part of the mainstream that we can read books like Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil without realising their debt to the early New Journalists of the sixties. Marc Weingarten's book tells for the first time how they pushed reportage beyond its narrow limits and changed the literary culture, and the fascinating stories behind the research and writing of books such as in Cold Blood.

Marc Weingarten

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