I grew up blocks from Hollywood Boulevard in the late ā60s and early ā70s and had something like a front-row seat to the greatest pop culture five-car pile-up in American history. At the Canteen on Hollywood and Vine, where my aunt would take me on summer weekdays for the āExtras for Extras Smorgasbord,ā youād rub shoulders with aging starlets, cowpokes, starry-eyed young hopefuls, and āleading menā in five-and-dime ascots who never had a leading role. Even Billy Barty, always of good cheer, would make the sceneāhe was so nice to me, and I had no idea he played my hero, Sigmund the Sea Monster!
If this beautifully illustrated collection of Hollywood tragedies were only kink, only lurid scandal like so many cheap TV potshots, it wouldnāt be the iconic masterpiece it has become. Kenneth Angerās take on the faded and fallen Hollywood differs because he loves the place and its people with all his heart.
A child starling and renegade director in his own right (Scorpio Rising, Kustom Kar Kommandoes), he oozes child-like wonder and horror on every page. As he puts it in the bookās equally stark sequel, Hollywood Babylon II, the movies āpromise immortality, but donāt really deliver.ā
āKenneth Anger has fashioned a delicious . . . box of poisoned bonbons. Picking through the slag heap of the Hollywood dream factory, [he] has put together a truly prodigious anthology of star-studded scandal.āāThe New York Times
Kenneth Anger is a former child movie actor who grew up to become one of Americaās leading underground filmmakers. Hollywood Babylon was originally published in Paris, and quickly became an underground legend. Not a word has been changed. Not a story omitted. Here is the hot, luscious plum of sizzling scandal that continues to shock the world.
Not usually considered a Hollywood novella per se, Bellowās āsmall grey masterpieceā (V.S. Pritchett) tracks failed actor Tommy Wilhelm on a dark Manhattan day when his luck and his money run out.
This book is at once a tender portrait of failure and a searing indictment of the false promises America makes to the gullible. Along the way, Tommy recalls his one and only screen roleāas a Hollywood extra, he briefly appeared barelegged in a kilt, pretending to blow bagpipesājust one more humiliation in a string of let-downs. By dayās end, Tommy goes face to face with humanity in a subway station and spirals toward āthe heartās ultimate needāātears.
āWhat makes all of this so remarkable is not merely Bellowās eye and ear for vital detail. Nor is it his talent for exposing the innards of character in a paragraph, a sentence, a phrase. It is Bellowās vision, his uncanny ability to seize the moment and to see beyond it.ā āChicago Sun-Times
A Penguin Classic
Fading charmer Tommy Wilhelm has reached his day of reckoning and is scared. In his forties, he still retains a boyish impetuousness that has brought him to the brink of chaos: He is separated from his wife and children, at odds with his vain,ā¦
The Extraordinary Journey of David Ingram
by
Dean Snow,
An ordinary sailor named David Ingram walked 3600 miles from Mexico to Canada over the course of eleven months in 1568-9. There, he and two companions were rescued by a French ship on the Bay of Fundy. They were the first Englishmen to explore the interior of North America.
Wanna know what happens when you donāt pay off the mobbed-up indie record promo guys, fellas like Joe Isgro and Fred DiSipio? Iāll tell you whatāyour record doesnāt get played on the radio, shmuck.
This killer history of the mavens and crooks who made the record business spin is enlightening, chilling, and hilarious at turns. Some radio programmers, once paid off, will take a record they have never heard, shake it by their ears, and say, āSounds good; I like it!ā
Copiously researched and documented, Hit Men is the highly controversial portrait of the pop music industry in all its wild, ruthless glory: the insatiable greed and ambition; the enormous egos; the fierce struggles for profits and power; the vendettas, rivalries, shakedowns, and payoffs. Chronicling the evolution of America's largest music labels from the Tin Pan Alley days to the present day, Fredric Dannen examines in depth the often venal, sometimes illegal dealings among the assorted hustlers and kingpins who rule over this multi-billion-dollar business.
Lessing was the rare woman among Britainās pack of Angry Young Men in the late Fifties and early Sixties, and, among her primary targets, was Hollywoodās sometimes thin, hyper-sentimental, maudlin version of love.
The centerpiece of this collection is the gut-punching title story, all about an aging theater actor who tries and fails to rekindle an old flame and then ends up with a brash actress half his age.
His new ladyās view of romance is contemporaryāwhich is to say, ice cold. After sleeping with him, she says, āYou know what, George? Youāve just got into the habit of loving. You just want something in your arms, thatās all. What do you do when youāre alone? Wrap yourself in a pillow?ā
Arizona Territory, 1871. Valeria ObregĆ³n and her ambitious husband, RaĆŗl, arrive in the raw frontier town of Tucson hoping to find prosperity. Changing Woman, an Apache spirit who represents the natural order of the world and its cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, welcomes Nest Feather, a twelve-year-old Apache girl,ā¦
Woody made fun of movie novelizations in Manhattan, but they have a special charm, especially when written by the director.* Tarantinoās gripping novel captures the changing of the guard in Hollywood ā69 as only a native son could, with special attention paid to Mansonās floppo music career.
The book also features some intense scenes that arenāt in the flick. For instance, in one chapter, Manson Family acolyte āPussycatā creepy crawls into an elderly coupleās home at midnight and strips naked in their bedroom while they sleep and thenā¦yeah, well, try not turning the pages, I dare ya.
*(Another fine example is The Last Days of Disco, With Cocktails at Petrossian Afterward by Whit Stillman.)
THE DELUXE HARDBACK EDITION FEATURING NEVER-BEFORE-SEEN PHOTOS, BONUS MATERIAL & AN EXCLUSIVE BOUNTY LAW SCRIPT BY QUENTIN TARANTINO
Quentin Tarantino's long-awaited first work of fiction - at once hilarious, delicious, and brutal - is the always surprising, sometimes shocking new novel based on his Academy Award-winning film.
The sunlit studio back lots and the dark watering holes of Hollywood are the setting for this audacious, hilarious, disturbing novel about life in the movie colony, circa 1969.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood tells the story of washed-up actor Rick Dalton. Once Rick had his own television series, a famous westernā¦
In Adamās second adventure, his beloved former piano teacher makes a deathbed request: he wants Adam to prove his sonās innocence in a decades-earlier murder case. There doesnāt seem to be much hope of solving such a cold caseāuntil Adam stumbles onto a test pressing of a never-released vinyl LP. The recording is of a high school garage band lost to the tides of the Paisley Underground, the acid-fueled early ā80s music scene that spawned the Bangles and the Three OāClock.
Down the psychedelic rabbit hole Adam falls, tracing the bandās journey from the middle-class garage to the precipice of fameāa twisted tale marked by crooked DJs, elder scammers, wellness hucksters, a teen cult, and the woman who held the key to the bandās triumph and ruin.
The Bedfordshire Warlock is a speculative fiction novel that explores the concept of reincarnation with respect to the inheritance of supernatural powers and a quest to increase those powers to the level of god-like abilities.
The main character, Dorian Leeves, is the reincarnation of a 300-year-old warlock murdered during oneā¦