Nick Tosches

 A Novel

In the Hand of Dante

Nonfiction back stories of 1960's rock and roll music business pioneers- the labels, the artists and the promoters, told in the gritty style of Nick Tosches.

Save the Last Dance for Satan

A biography of Jerry Lewis' partner in comedy discusses Martin's Ohio childhood, his rise to the heights of fame as a singer, his uneasy partnership with Lewis and the Rat Pack, and his troubled personal life

Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams

Dino

A portrait of singer Jerry Lee Lewis details his early life, music, controversial marriage, problems and decline, endurance, and revival in popularity

Hellfire

The author of "Country" now offers a paean to a forsaken time of relentless excess, sudden ruin, and fierce music--the days of rock 'n' roll, long before Elvis came on the scene. 42 illustrations.

The Birth of Rock in the Wild Years Before Elvis

Unsung Heroes of Rock 'n' Roll

The Mafia, Asian drug lords, and Wall Street financiers wage an all-out war for control of the world's multi-billion-dollar heroin trade, while a lawman fights a battle for his own soul

Trinities

A biography of the controversial fighter follows Liston from the mean streets, where he was a petty criminal, to the heavyweight championship and his life as a pawn of organized crime. By the author of Power on Earth. Reprint. 25,000 first printing.

The Devil and Sonny Liston

Deep inside the Vatican library, a priest discovers the rarest and most valuable art object ever found: the manuscript of The Divine Comedy, written in Dante's own hand. Via Sicily, the manuscript makes its way from the priest to a mob boss in New York City, where a writer named Nick Tosches is called to authenticate the prize. For this writer, the temptation is too great: he steals the manuscript in a last-chance bid to have it all. Some will find it offensive; others will declare it transcendent; it is certain to be the most ragingly debated novel of the decade.

A Novel

Jean Esch

La Belle Vie dans la sale industrie du rêve

Dino 

Me and the Devil

Cut Numbers 

Newsday has said that Nick Tosches "casts brilliant black light." The San Diego Reader has said that "Tosches's best sentences uncoil like rattlesnakes and strike with a venom that spreads poison through all the little Sunday-school ideas you've held dear." And Rolling Stone has said that "Tosches can write like a wild rockabilly raveup. He can be elegant as a slow blues." The Nick Tosches Reader is the author's own selection of his best work over the past thirty years, including fiction, poetry, interviews, rock writing, investigative journalism, and criticism. First published in major magazines, obscure underground periodicals, and his own best-selling books, many of these selections deal with rock 'n' roll and cultural icons—but there are also pieces on everything from William Faulkner to organized crime to heavyweight boxing, including the Vanity Fair feature that gave rise to Tosches's major new book on Sonny Liston, published by Little, Brown. Here is "a unique and darkly impressionistic cultural history" of the last three decades as only Nick Tosches could write it.

The Nick Tosches Reader

The Twisted Roots of Rock 'N' Roll

Country

A sprawling portrait of the notorious gambler and New York City businessman Arnold Rothstein examines the numerous myths that surrounded his life, from his alleged links to the "Black Sox" scandal and the fixing of the 1919 World Series, to his inspiration of literary and stage characters. Reprint.

The Greatest Mob Story Never Told

King of the Jews

Celebrating the dark origins of our most American music, Country reveals a wild shadowland of history that encompasses blackface minstrels and yodeling cowboys; honky-tonk hell and rockabilly heaven; medieval myth and musical miscegenation; sex, drugs, murder; and rays of fierce illumination on Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, and others, famous and forgotten, whose demonology is America's own. Profusely and superbly illustrated, Country stands as one of the most brilliant explorations of American musical culture ever written.

The Twisted Roots Of Rock 'n' Roll

A work of dangerous and haunting beauty by America's last real literary outlaw. Under Tiberius is a thrilling story of crime and deceit involving the man who came to be called Jesus Christ. Deep in the recesses of the Vatican, Nick Tosches unearths a first-century memoir by Gaius Fulvius Falconius, foremost speechwriter for Emperor Tiberius. The codex is profound, proof of the existence of a Messiah who was anything but the one we've known -- a shabby and licentious thief. After encountering him in the streets of Judea, Gaius becomes spin doctor to Jesus, and the pair schemes to accrue untold riches by convincing the masses that Jesus is the Son of God. As their marriage of truth and lies is consummated, friendship and wary respect develop between these two grifters. Outrageous and disturbing, Under Tiberius is as black as the ravishing night, shot through with fierce and brilliant light.

Under Tiberius

The author, fueled by romantic, spiritual, and medicinal needs, details his mesmerizing quest--part spiritual, part hallucinogenic--from Europe to Cambodia, in search of the mysterious opium den, ultimately discovering the key to true fulfillment. 20,000 first printing.

The Last Opium Den

An aging New Yorker, a writer named Nick, feels life ebbing out of him. The world has gone to hell and Nick is so sick of it all that he can't even have a glass of champagne. Then one night he meets a tantalizing young woman who agrees to come back to his apartment. Their encounter is the most strangely extraordinary of his life. Propelled by uncontrollable, primordial desires, he enters a new and unimagined dimension of the forbidden and is filled with a sexual and spiritual ecstasy that is as intense as it is unholy. Suddenly Nick's senses are alive. He feels strong, unconquerable, beyond all inhibition and earthly morality. He indulges in life's pleasures, pure and perverse, sublime and dangerous, from the delicate flavors of the perfect tomato to the fleshy beauty of a woman's thigh. But Nick's desire to sustain his rapture leads him to a madness and a darkness far greater and dreadful than have ever ridden the demon mares of night. Writing in a lineage that includes Dante, William S. Burroughs, Charles Bukowski, Hubert Selby, Jr., and Hunter S. Thompson, Nick Tosches may be America's last real literary outlaw -- a fearless, uncensorable seeker of our deepest secret truths and desires, from the basest to the most beautiful. Me and the Devil is outrageous, disturbing, and brilliant, a raw and blazing novel truly unlike any other. Like the man said: Read him at your peril. "A raw and blazing novel by "the single, most brain-searingly dangerous man of letters. Read him at your peril." -- Anthony Bourdain

Nick Tosches

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