Jerry Stahl: 9 books

“Often brilliant, always compelling.” — Pittsburgh Tribune From 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...

**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,...

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...

OG (Old Guy) Dad recounts the adventures of a man who, in the proverbial autumn of his years, or at least the pre pre-autumn, discovers his girlfriend is pregnant. And having a baby. Whereupon hijinks, cosmic and mundane, ensues. A collection of celebrated columns on The Rumpus with new material and never-before-told tales, OG (Old Guy) Dad is Jerry Stahl at his finest and most domestic.

Bad Sex On Speed is a savage, careening, hyper-real nightmare of a novel, taking us to the depths of Amphetamine America. Told with no concession to traditional narrative, in the voices of those in the grips and on the fringes, the stories that emerge are at once devastating, hysterical, and-perhaps...

In a wildly careening plot that can only be described as crack noir, two pipeheads accidentally steal a photo of George W. Bush's presidential package and decide to blackmail the Republican Party. Before the crack-crazed thieves can follow through, however, gorgeous, whip-smart Nurse Tina, who's just...

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.

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...

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....