It’s been a long while since I logged into this space. As many of you know, I’ve been diligently working on a book about the Village Voice since summer 2018, which is right when Skyler left the Earth. I spent that fall of 2018 traveling the South, and spent a long rejuvenating month in New Orleans, which doesn’t shy away from death. I saw friends in Nashville, and tried to find my way back again. It took a long time.
Through the pandemic, I chipped away at this book, The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper that Changed American Culture. It’s out on PublicAffairs TODAY! Please order it at any of your favorite bookstores—or Bookshop.
It consists of more than 200 interviews spliced into a narrative, both about New York and the paper. It has gotten a lovely reception in the press with Dwight Garner of the New York Times calling it “a well-made disco ball of a book — it’s big, discursive, ardent, intellectual and flecked with gossip. “The Freaks Came Out to Write” may be the best history of a journalistic enterprise I’ve ever read, in that its garrulous tone so mirrors the institution’s own.” The Guardian UK wrote, “The Freaks Came Out to Write is a rueful elegy for rawer, cheaper, better days,” (there’s a grief angle for you.”, and it received a coveted starred review from Publisher’s Weekly, which said: “Brimming with riveting anecdotes and capturing its subject’s rollicking spirit, this is a remarkable portrait of the “nation’s first alternative newspaper.”
I am going to be in New York City for three events, please come by if you can. McNally Jackson Seaport with Gillian McCain on Wednesday the 28th is sold out but you can sign up for the wait list. I will be in Long Island at the Next Chapter Bookstore in conversation with Voice alumni Donna Gaines and Eileen Markey on March 1st. And finally, I will be in conversation with Voice heavy hitters, Nelson George, Joe Conason, and Amy Taubin, March 5th at Greenlight in Brooklyn. For more info, check out my link.tree.