Jerry Stahl

A guided group tour to concentration camps in Poland and Germany allows Stahl to confront personal and historical demons with both despair and humor."Nein, Nein, Nein is the unbelievable true story of a guided bus tour to Nazi concentration camps, told as only Jerry Stahl can tell it, with an acid wit as deadly serious as it is hilarious, insane, and weirdly life-affirming. The destinations he describes are real, but who else would dare to take us there? Stahl is fearless, gripping, and most unsparing about his own damned soul. I read everything he writes."--Eric Bogosian"There's dark humor, and then there is Nein, Nein, Nein Jerry Stahl manages a balancing act here that would put all the trapeze artists of the world to shame."--Lucy Sante, author of Low Life"A disturbing, funny, dark travelogue."--Marc Maron, stand-up comicIn 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 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 our entire country--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 tour-rash to the truly disturbing snack bar at Auschwitz. Strap in for a raw, surreal, and redemptively hilarious trip. Get on the bus.

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.

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....

Writers On The Edge offers a range of essays, memoirs and poetry written by major contemporary authors who bring fresh insight into the dark world of addiction, from drugs and alcohol, to sex, gambling and food. Editors Diana M. Raab and James Brown have assembled an array of talented and courageous writers who share their stories with heartbreaking honesty as they share their obsessions as well as the awe-inspiring power of hope and redemption. "Open to any piece in this collection, and the scalding, unflinching, overwhelming truths within will shine light on places most people never look. Anyone who reads this book, be they users or used, will put it down changed. And when they raise their eyes from the very last page, the world they see may be redeemed, as well." --Jerry Stahl, author of Permanent Midnight CONTRIBUTORS: Frederick & Steven Barthelme, Kera Bolonik, Margaret Bullitt-Jonas, Maud Casey, Anna David, Denise Duhamel, B.H. Fairchild, Ruth Fowler, David Huddle Perie Longo, Gregory Orr, Victoria Patterson, Molly Peacock, Scott Russell Sanders, Stephen Jay Schwartz, Linda Gray Sexton, Sue William Silverman, Chase Twichell, and Rachel Yoder About the Editors Diana M. Raab, an award-winning memoirist and poet, is author of six books including Healing With Words and Regina's Closet. She's an advocate of the healing power of writing and teaches nation-wide workshops and in the UCLA Extension Writers' Program. James Brown, a recovering alcoholic and addict, is the author of the memoirs, The Los Angeles Diaries and This River. He is Professor of English in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at California State University, San Bernardino. From the Reflections of America Series Modern History Press www.ModernHistoryPress.com SEL006000 Self-Help: Substance Abuse & Addictions - Alcoholism SEL003000 Self-Help: Adult Children of Alcoholics PSY038000 Psychology: Psychopathology - Addiction

Down-and-out ex-cop and not-quite-reformed addict Manny Rupert accepts an undercover job to find out if a California prison inmate is who he claims to be: Josef Mengele, aka the Angel of Death. Did the sadistic legend, whose Auschwitz crimes still horrify, fake his own death thirty years ago? Suddenly Manny finds himself in the middle of a conspiracy involving genocide, drugs, eugenics, human experiments, and America's secret history of collusion with the Nazis--all while careening from one extreme of apocalypse-adjacent reality to the other.Not for the faint of heart, Jerry Stahl's Pain Killers hurtles readers into a disturbing, original, and alarmingly real world filled with some of the strangest sex, most horrific violence, and screaming wit ever found on the page.

Now a motion picture starring Ben Stiller, this is the autobiography of a former television writer who lands a job penning what he considers to be crappy but lucrative TV scripts, and descends into a quasi-functional heroin addiction.

A self-destructive, ex-junkie detective, a sexy nurse who kills her infomercial guru husband with a bowl of Drano-laced cereal, and two outrageous villains compete to find an elusive--and incriminating--photograph of President George W. Bush. By the author of Perv--A Love Story. Reprint.

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.