Jerry Stahl – författare

"Often brilliant, always compelling." — Pittsburgh TribuneFrom acclaimed and controversial author Jerry Stahl comes one of the most vividly subversive, savagely funny, explosive novels yet unleashed in our tender century. Pain Killers is a violent and mind-wrenching masterpiece in the Gonzo Noir style that has earned Jerry Stahl his legion of avid fans. For those who enjoy the works of Chuck Palahniuk, Terry Southern, and Hunter S Thompson—as well as Stahl''s own Permanent Midnight, I Fatty, Perv–A Love Story, and Plainclothes Naked—Pain Killers is sure to please.

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.

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, and his job is to recite and minimize-sometimes by just saying them really fast-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, to exact revenge on those who poison the populace in order to sell them the cure. Stahl's gleefully twisted, maniacally brilliant prose, will delight, appall, and prove, once again, that Stahl is a better-than-Burroughs virtuoso (New Yorker).

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.

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.

Now in paperback and featuring an interview with Ben Stiller; a guided group tour to concentration camps allows Stahl to confront personal and historical demons with both deep despair and savage humorIN 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 tourrash to the truly disturbing snack bar at Auschwitz. Strap in for a raw, surreal, and redemptively hilarious trip. Get on the bus.

A manic exploration of death and the absurdity of life.Jerry is stuck on the toilet at 9 a.m., procrastinating on a low-rent freelance gig about the late Senator Lindsey Graham, when he finds himself face-to-face with an impossible visitor: his mother, who’s dead, and has been for quite some time. She claims his father is missing in the Afterlife—and needs her only son to help find him.In Deadville, Jerry finds himself in a chaotic bureaucratic afterlife packed with dead celebrities—from Benjamin Franklin to Amy Winehouse—all with unresolved grudges. He careens through misadventures with Lou Reed (and Lou’s sock puppet named Sugar), as his mother bullies, shames, and emotionally steamrolls him at every turn. But his father isn’t really missing, he’s thriving—reinvented as a delusional Reichsführer running a Nazi-infested pool hall.The manic ride through the Afterlife leaves Jerry pulverized, love-struck, and addicted to death. Part metaphysical satire, part post-life fever dream, Bad Sex in the Afterlife reads like a deranged cousin of Lincoln in the Bardo—if Thomas Pynchon and William S. Burroughs co-wrote a cursed family memoir at gunpoint.

From Cocaine, that 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 Cocaine Chronicles: that most troubling and fascinating of substances is the subject, the subtext, the whys and whereofs in this collection of original short stories that are funny and harrowing, sad and scary, but at all times riveting. In this bold anthology by a cross-section of today's most thought-provoking writers, we meet the casual sniffers, the heavy users, the dealers, the victims and the unsuspecting victims - hysterical romps, tragic characters and unfathomable lows - rendering cocaine a drug that is anything but glamorous.The Speed Chronicles - Deprived of the ingrained romantic mysticism of the opiate or the cosmopolitan chic of cocaine, there is no sympathy for this devil. Speed - crystal meth, amphetamines, Dexedrine, Benzedrine, Adderall; crank, spizz, chickenscratch, oblivious marching powder, the go-fast - twice the productivity at half the cost, and equal opportunity for all. It feels so good and hurts so bad. The first contemporary collection of all new literary short fiction on the drug from an array of today's most compelling and respected authors. These are no stereotypical tales of tweakers - the element of crime and the bleary-eyed, shaky zombies at dawn are here right alongside heart-wrenching narratives of everyday people, good intentions gone terribly awry and dreams going up in flames.The Heroin Chronicles - 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.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, Tao Lin, Joseph Mattson, Eric Bogosian, Gary Phillips and Jervey Tervalon.CONTENTS - COCAINETen Keys - Lee ChildThe Crack Cocaine Diet - Laura LippmanWhite Irish - Ken BruenBeneficent Diversions from the Crackdkins Diet - Donnell AlexanderPoinciana - Susan StraightThe Screenwriter - James BrownTwilight of the Stooges - Jerry StahlChemistry - Robert WardShame - Kerry E. WestViki, Flash, and the Pied-Piper of Shoebies - Deborah VankinGolden Pacific - Nina RevoyrSentimental Value - Manuel RamosJust Surviving Another Day - Detrice JonesA.K.A. Moises Rockafella - Emory Holmes IICamaro Blue - Bill MoodyServing Monster - Jervey TervalonDisco Zombies - Gary PhillipsCONTENTS - SPEEDHow to Go to Dinner With a Brother On Drugs - Natalie DiazWar Cry - Sherman AlexieBad - Jerry StahlLabiodental Fricative - Scott PhillipsOsito - Kenji JasperAmp is the First Word in Amphetamine - Joseph MattsonAddiction - James FrancoWheelbarrow Kings - Jess WalterTips 'n' Things by Elayne - Beth LisickPissing in Perpetuity - Rose Bunch51 Hours - Tao LinEverything I Want - Megan AbbottThe Speed of Things - James GreerNo Matter How Beautifully It Stings - William T. VollmannCONTENTS - HEROINFragments of Joe - Tony O'NeillHot for the Shot - Sophia LangdonDos Mac + The Jones - Nathan LarsonPossible Side Effects - Jerry StahlGoing Down - L.Z. HansenBaby I Need to See A Man About A Duck - Michael AlboGodhead - Eric BogosianGift Horse - Jervey TervalonGhost Town Lydia LunchThe Monster - John AlbertBlack Caesar's Gold - Gary PhillipsSunshine for Adrienne - Antonia CranePoppy Love - Ava Stander

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.CONTENTSFragments of Joe - Tony O'NeillHot for the Shot - Sophia LangdonDos Mac + The Jones - Nathan LarsoPossible Side Effects - Jerry StahlGoing Down - L.Z. HansenBaby I Need to See A Man About A Duck - Michael AlboGodhead - Eric BogosianGift Horse - Jervey TervalonGhost Town Lydia LunchThe Monster - John AlbertBlack Caesar's Gold - Gary PhillipsSunshine for Adrienne - Antonia CranePoppy Love - Ava Stander

Jerry Stahl's seminal memoir of drug addiction and a career in Hollywood, Permanent Midnight is a classic along the lines of Hubert Selby, Jr.'s Last Exit to Brooklyn. Illuminating the self-loathing and self-destruction of an addict's inner life, Permanent Midnight follows Stahl through the dregs of addiction and into sobriety. In 1998, Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, and Maria Bello starred in a film version of Permanent Midnight to much acclaim. Nic Sheff, author of Tweak, writes the introduction to this edition.