The Nick Tosches Reader [Paperback]

Nick Tosches (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 4, 2000

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Tosches is best known for his 100-proof biographies of Dean Martin and Jerry Lee Lewis, and his beautifully trenchant life of the prize-fighter Sonny Liston (see review above) will arrive to the timely accompaniment of this collection from his diverse writing career, showing Tosches to be more than a gifted, dogged chronicler of flawed public figures. The Reader contains more than 100 pieces, including excerpts from the author's nonfiction, his two novels (Cut Numbers, Trinities), dozens of magazine pieces that appeared in such publications as Rolling Stone, Esquire and Vanity Fair (to which Tosches is now a contributing editor) and riffs on Charles Olson's Maximus Poems, Sinatra's voice, Miles Davis's horn, Carly Simon's mouth and "The Singer Madonna Arraigned by the Ghost of Pope Alexander VI." While these pieces, taken together, show the arc of a successful career, they also give a glimpse of a period in magazine writing that is long gone, in which hell-bent editors such as Lester Bangs would assign a review of a new album and the reviewer could simply talk about how the packaging felt in his hands. Tosches, early in his career, paid his bills with small fees garnered as a music critic, and this lively era of no-holds-barred journalism (later to be dubbed "New") is on raunchy display here. Creem asked Tosches to interview Patti Smith, and the rock-poet says, "Hell, Nick, you know me. Just make it up." And he does. In Rock magazine, he reviewed an album that never existed ("It is indeed quite difficult to approach this album with the pedestrian sensibilities that suffice for most musical creations"). The term "pedestrian" will never be applied to Tosches--neither in his interests nor his prose style. In this carefully constructed collection, for which Tosches provides contextual links and anecdotes about the composition of each piece, readers will get a complex and satisfying portrait not only of a time but of a deeply reflective and probing writer who, beneath the din of music and gangsters and poseurs, hears what he calls "the wisdom and power of silence and wind." (Apr.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Best known for his classic Jerry Lee Lewis biography, Hellfire, Tosches has compiled his book and record reviews, articles, rock interviews, and other works that have appeared in magazines (under- and overground) in the last 30 years. While organizing this anthology-of-sorts, he also wrote funny and insightful introductions to each piece. The best parts are the short fiction and personal essays, which are often overtly sexual and hubristic but written with an Olympian mastery of language--it's like reading Bukowski by way of Tennyson. The resulting work would, in a just world, make Tosches the patron saint of literate, disaffected male college students with an ear for caustic, honest work. The music writings and book reviews are ultimately esoteric but help forge this collection into a fascinating document of New York City subculture and the dissipation of the Altamont generation. Recommended for larger social science collections.
-Colin Carlson, New York
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 624 pages
• Publisher: Da Capo Press (April 4, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0306809699
• ISBN-13: 978-0306809699
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #147,779 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars THE NICK OF TIME, September 12, 2000

By 

Russ Tarby "Russ Tarby" (Liverpool, N.Y.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Nick Tosches Reader (Paperback)

From his groanings about girls who done him wrong to the great insights into the peccadilloes of his biographic subjects, Nick Tosches astonishes with his devil-may-care prose style. He can be gentle as a feather as demonstrated in several poems printed here or he can be brutal as a bloody machete as evidenced in the unflinching profiles of Dean Martin, Sonny Liston and Jerry Lee Lewis--but he's ALWAYS both honest and entertaining. That's not to say that he simply supplants the historical record with fancy literary devices. On the contrary, as a researcher Tosches' tentacles reach from the basements of dusty libraries to the boardrooms of entertainment executives to the social clubs that function as Mafia fronts. For anyone so sheltered that they haven't encountered Tosches' work elsewhere in the past two decades, this READER serves as an apt introduction to one of the most talented writers of our time.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A unique voice that you gotta hear!, April 27, 2000

By 

Patrick Wagner (Philadelphia ,PA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Nick Tosches Reader (Paperback)

Nick Tosches has written reviews,journalism biography and novels. It isn't until you are deep into this collection,that you realize how Tosches has built his writing into a combination of all of these. It doesn't just contain magazine articles and old reviews,it also contins healthy hunks of his novels and full-length biographies. This is well-worth your time if you are familiar with his writing and want more, or if you are just getting interested in this unique writer. I have to go now; I want to read some of the selections ,again.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars In the hand of Tosches, August 26, 2004

By 

B. W. Fairbanks "Brian W. Fairbanks" (Lakewood, OH United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Nick Tosches Reader (Paperback)

If Humphrey Bogart (or the characters he usually played) had been a writer, he might have been Nick Tosches. Tough and funny with an iconoclasm even Bogie would have been hard-pressed to match, the author acknowledges his tough guy aspirations in the foreword to this collection of his early work: "I thought of myself as a tough guy. That is to say I pretended to be a tough guy." The cover photograph showing Tosches with cigarette in hand, a wiseguy look in his eyes, suggest he's still pretending. It may be an act but Tosches has the write stuff to pull it off.

That foreword may be one of the most honest self-portraits a writer has ever published. He admits what most of us who toil in the land of ink-stained wretchdom would probably deny but know to be true: we write because we're afraid to look someone in the eye and tell the honest, unvarnished truth about ourselves and others. But even confronting a blank piece of paper requires a courage many writers and aspiring writers lack. Tosches has courage in abundance. Anyone who subscribes to the foolishness of political correctness won't be able to endure more than a few pages of Tosches's writing. He's brutal in his honesty, and refuses to bow down and kiss the ring of popular fashion. Whether the subject is his own youth, Elvis (his ruminations on the King are a highlight), Miles Davis, fellow writer Lester Bangs, drugs, sex, rock and roll, or country music, Tosches, whose formal education never progressed beyond high-school, writes about it in an often erudite manner that is saved from pretension by the tough kick to the groin he frequently administers.

This collection was compiled from Tosches' writings through the years for publications large and small, and usually obscure and forgotten. His prose (and the several pages of poetry included) is shocking, funny, and damn good. This a collection to turn to again and again.

Brian W. Fairbanks