Steven (he/him)
Steven has been a bookseller in some (every) capacity since 2010. This means that he is very strong. He's faster than a book! In his experience, most books are about monsters or punk rock or cooking or the terrible things that have happened in history. Would you like to see these books?
"More than just an academic history or a cultural anthropology, Low Life represents a vast living mythology of New York City. From the exaltation of murder in Gilded Age slums to the vampiric avarice of the upper crust, Lucy Sante draws a map of the city with the blood of the people it has slain and the quicksilver of the people who have adapted. Intercut with her own hallucinatory experiences on the Lower East Side, Low Life plunges into the dreams of the city that never sleeps."
"Immortal creatures roam the night, taking what they crave without regard for the laws of man. With transgressive violence and forbidden passion, Lost Souls splatters a picture of yearning against a canvas of human flesh."
"Committed to paper in spare, unflinching prose, this harsh but compassionate novel precisely captures the peculiar sadness of being a child. Populated with misfits and eccentrics, pugilists, rebels, and manics, the seedy suburb of Niagara Falls is haunted by the memories of its melancholy past. Three fast friends spend one unforgettable summer investigating the paranormal and all-too-human mysteries that shape their community."
"Begun in 1975, Revenge of the She-Punks is a project that could only have been completed after a lifetime of documentation from the fringes of society - immersion in the subject to the extent that it becomes one's sole, driving force, if not the totality of one's being. This exploration of the role of gender in punk music asks what it is to be a marginalized group within a marginalized art form and how punk's symphony of frustration can be uniquely empowering for women. Vivien Goldman's masterpiece may have started as an article in a magazine half-a-century ago, but, through her total devotion to her craft, it has become a dissertation on her own life."
"DYKES TO WATCH OUT FOR was a syndicated, weekly comic strip that accumulated the musings, manias, and mimesis of graphic memoirist Alison Bechdel in what she describes as "half op-ed column and half endless serialized Victorian novel". This colossal omnibus collects the quintessential heartbreaks, frustrations, flings, and fantasies of the sprawling cast of characters throughout its twenty-five-year run. This volume is a perfect entry point to the longest-running queer-centric soap opera of all time."
"Jim Carroll as a teenager was a basketball prodigy first, a poet second, and a junkie third. Sometime between Fall 1963 and Summer 1966, somewhere between the Bowery and 225th Street, those priorities got rearranged. Written in the frantic poetry of the street, these diaries reflect a chaotic, juvenile philosophy that approaches some kind of screaming purity, if only to miss the mark by the breadth of a needle."
August Wilson wields humor and pathos as twin enchantments in the masterful sleight of hand that holds this spectacular illusion together. Devastatingly funny and brutally candid, The Piano Lesson pits desperate ambition against family legacy in a household divided by guilt and passion within the reality of the Black experience not long removed from slavery. Braided narratives circle each other for two breathless acts before exploding as one in a triumphant, final note.
I was reading this book at the same time that I was selling plasma, and I laughed so hard that it fucked up the machine.
Kid Congo Powers is the coolest guy in the room. His ritualistic and instinctive bursts of sonic brilliance have electrified the music of The Gun Club, The Cramps, and Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds. His influence can be felt in everything that's interesting over the last forty years. This is his hero's journey of discovering his sexual identity through glam rock, navigating the LA punk scene as an awkward, Chicano boy, and withstanding blow after devastating blow on his way to glory.
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Delightfully bizarre in the warped tones that only Daniel Clowes can paint, The Death-Ray is a standalone graphic novel pulled from the iconically transgressive pages of legendary comic series Eightball. Teenage justice, absurd violence, and reflection on a life wasted as a small town supervillain illustrate the pages of this troubling masterwork.
A family history, an exploration of spiritual practice, and a deeply personal memoir of trauma and survival, Red Paint blends a devil-may-care, punk rock aesthetic with the deeply-rooted, cultural traditions of the Upper Skagit and Nooksack people. This sweepingly lyrical, personal saga chronicles the troubled and triumphant life of a rebel girl and the tangled odyssey of the women who brought her to life.
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Throughout this surreal folk legend, the ghosts of a deserted, Mexican city weave interlocking tales of an evil man. Hallucinations, echoes, and the dreams of the dead detail the crimes and passions of Pedro Páramo and the calculated downfall of his remote village. Largely regarded as the forerunner of magical realism, Juan Rulfo's hypnotic tone poem has irreversibly heightened and complicated the storytelling tradition.
Born Zelda Sayre to Alabama royalty at the tail of the Gilded Age, much would speculated and supposed about this spirited child throughout her brief and sensational life. Nancy Milford has sifted truth from tabloid in this exceptional exploration of the parallels and perpendiculars between the fictionalized Zelda as portrayed in the Fitzgerald canon and the woman as she existed in the world. Socialite, flapper, schizophrenic, novelist, dancer - Zelda Fitzgerald the human is now somewhat demystified.
Poking a Dead Frog is more than a writing manual and better than a book of advice. Mike Sacks has documented the triumph of whimsy over severity, and, in so doing, has shed some light on the essentially nonsensical foundation of the world. Through a series of sprawling interviews and bursts of ultra-specific comedy knowledge, we are treated to a masterclass on - if not necessarily how to be funny - at least what it's like to inhabit a skull plagued by funniness.
Madeline Hanna woke up hungover on the morning of her college graduation, and things never got any easier. An honors thesis on the literary tradition of "the marriage plot" looms heavily overhead, and her own love life seems to be following the same, tangled trajectory of the embroiled heroines of her study. In the grand meta-genre of the reflection becoming the reflected, Jeffrey Eugenides navigates his own hall of mirrors by closing his eyes and gleefully smashing his way through.
"The animals have spoken, and it's driving humans wild. As a mind-bending, zoonotic word virus transforms the Australian landscape, a deeply troubled matriarch and her half-wild dingo travel the unraveling continent to put their pack back together. This is grim, experimental literature that is both grand in scope and and accessibly unpretentious. Laura Jean McKay's debut plague novel is both nihilistically devastating and appallingly, irreverently hilarious."
"There is a calculated madness to everything Robert Evans touched. All of his productions were intricate schemes wrapped inside of convoluted, back alley bargains, but, without that Evans factor - that serendipitous key bump of divine inspiration - nothing ever could have left the ground. As it happened, though, Bob Evans was flying high for decades. So much more than one man's story, The Kid Stays in the Picture is a swashbuckling chronicle of a bygone era in Hollywood, as told by the pirate king who watched it all burn."
"In 1999, Warren Ellis became the steward of a holy object, a castoff artifact of triumph and exultation. When Nina Simone spat her chewing gum onto a piano at the Meltdown Festival, she could not have known that an Australian wild man would scramble onstage after she had gone and take it as his own. She could never have suspected that he would then commit to this absurd, reverential conservatorship for the next twenty years. This memoir-of-sorts documents a lifetime of obsession and the mad sprint toward transcendence."
"Here lies a clinical dissection of Japanese folklore dancing with gleeful yōkai and vengeful spirits; a ghastly meta-haunting that embraces Scooby Doo tropes as it thoughtfully disembowels them. Cassandra Khaw's surgical, syntactic precision ensures that every paragraph of this emaciated novella bears the weight of cursed centuries."
A Feast of Snakes is Harry Crews's relentlessly tragic and brutal magnum opus and a harrowing achievement of the Southern gothic genre. His unsentimental prose dissects the drunken disappointments and bleak realities of a life barely lived. Beneath the saran wrap and formica veneer of small town charm churns a volatile chemical fire of seething rage that all too frequently erupts in a crescendo of useless violence.
Disfigured and transgressive, these beautifully strange stories drip mucus from the pages, leaving a slick stain on everything they touch. In this literary crescendo of avant-garde violence and decadent filth, Megan Milks exposes the banal horror of consciousness trapped in a living body.
Connected by circumstance of geography, the interwoven lives depicted in this achingly beautiful novel-in-parts are equally tragic and transcendent. Gloria Naylor's hypnotic prose dismantles expectations and disorients its subjects to the extent that we never suspect the crushing blow of inevitability as reality comes toppling down.
This seductive collection of thematically interlocking stories probes the inner workings of women divided by generation, by class, by sexuality, by era - but linked by yearning, by need, and by grace. "The Secret Lives of Church Ladies" explodes the beating heart of desire over every small town, raining the wonderful, horrible debris of love over every upturned face.
A miasma of dread permeates Zin. E. Rocklyn's viscerally upsetting novella of cathartic putrefaction. Social politics and the sanctity of the self languish thirstily on the high seas in this surreal, peri-apocalyptic, waking nightmare. Rocklyn's electrifyingly righteous prose lights up the all the major nerve centers and rampages uninhibited through the body for a hundred breathless pages.
Grant Morrison is a great, unsung anthropologist of disposable culture. In addition to providing a thorough survey of comic book history, this exploration of a subculture ascendant tells us what a bunch of make-believe freaks, mutants, aliens, robots, and demigods reveals about the species that created them. Not since "The Hero with a Thousand Faces" has an academic work so comprehensively analyzed the mythical structures and archetypes of human storytelling.
Shlockmaster Charles Band is known for getting things done fast, cheap, and over the top, and his new memoir checks all the boxes. As satisfying as a hit from an evil bong, as absurd as Gary Busey back from the dead as a killer cookie, as juicy as the Blood of 1000 Virgins, "Confessions of a Puppetmaster" is a good, old-fashioned gossip rag wrung dry by the scheming, shmoozing, macabre mind of the fastest buck in Hollywood.
![White Trash Cooking: 25th Anniversary Edition [A Cookbook] By Ernest Matthew Mickler Cover Image](https://images.booksense.com/images/books/879/741/FC9781607741879.JPG)
A culture's cuisine tells their story in a way that conventional histories don't quite capture. The traditional food of a society conveys the resources available within a given region, the average range of travel for its members, the degree to which a group comingles with its neighbors, and their relative socioeconomic status. That this particular culinary folklore relies almost exclusively on onions and mayonnaise isn't great, but the recipes are very easy and sloppily delicious. Enjoy the horrible food of my people!
With just an arsenal of smutty one-liners, spooky innuendo, and a plunging neckline at her disposal, Cassandra Peterson elevated her character of Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, from schlocky, late night movie host to burlesque horror queen and queer icon the world over. Her new memoir is an uninhibited roll in the haunted hayride, sensationally scripting a life lived to its electrifying fullest and leaving nothing to the imagination.
A pretty girl in a pink dress walks to the microphone and calmly regards the crowd. Then she explodes. Her transformation is immediate and transfixing. By the time the audience understands what is happening, they are already under her control. "Violence Girl" tracks the ongoing evolution of Alice Bag - from an introverted outcast in East LA to a feminist, punk rock icon - from a nihilistic, social pariah to a teacher and prominent Chicano rights activist. Alice Bag has an uncanny, lyrical voice that spews poetry behind the dumpster.
Maryse Conde's sparse, fatalistic drama manifests and playfully subverts the classic, Western witch hunt narrative by resurrecting the historical figure of Tituba, who was a Barbadian slave in Salem, Massachusetts and the only Black woman ever convicted of witchcraft in America. Alternately bleak and wryly funny, I TITUBA, BLACK WITCH OF SALEM fills a tragic void in history by giving voice to a name that time forgot.
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"At times ugly and violent, others transcendently beautiful, Stephen Graham Jones's unpretentious prose mirrors the lives of his troubled characters as they navigate their chaotic landscapes. These are powerful, wise, flawed, disenfranchised, but, above all, deeply ordinary people at odds with the past and each other and a primal, monstrous manifestation of tribal law. Like the lives it depicts, "The Only Good Indians" is a relentless, unflinching, and unapologetically human experience."
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"At the height of their success, the Go-Go's were a powder keg of raw passion and innovative, pop brilliance. The inevitable explosion would leave a crater in the sonic landscape of the world and the lives of everyone they touched. In this imminently readable rock-and-roll memoir, Kathy Valentine chronicles the dizzying highs of manic creativity and the punishing comedown of the dark excess that follows. Sometimes the hardest part of getting all you ever wanted is just surviving it."
Mental illness is a difficult subject to navigate due to its necessarily imprecise nature and the stigma attached to the afflicted. Schizophrenia, in particular, too often reduces its sufferers to little more than a diagnosis and a burden. However, Robert Kolker approaches his subjects with empathy and respect, humanizing a medical oddity and challenging readers to confront their preconceptions about disease and the bonds of family.
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"Some guys have it all: functional alcoholism, IBS, a face like mayonnaise puts him on its sandwiches. Colin Jost has been responsible for some of the most iconic sketch comedy on TV over the last fifteen years. His writing is esoterically brilliant, jarringly funny, and, when it needs to be, the dumbest thing you've ever seen. This memoir is not unlike lobster at a diner - a weird choice but, ultimately, the only correct one."
"There is power in being proper. Nice, southern ladies have always been the unacknowledged gatekeepers of authority, and everybody knows it - it just wouldn't be polite to talk about. Grady Hendrix's cultural pastiche of Charleston in the '90s explores the particular anxieties of good housekeeping back when men were still men, women were still women, and vampires were still fiends that ate your children at night. A little hydrogen peroxide will get the bloodstains right out."
"This cookbook boils over with simple yet elegant recipes that effortlessly vivify the home kitchen. Québécois meals are served by way of Los Angeles with a Polish garnish for the consummate, cosmopolitan dining experience. The cauliflower steaks with turmeric and crunchy almonds are edible poetry."
"To thoroughly examine the life of a stranger is, in one sense, to give oneself over partially to their experiences and, in another, to confer one's own experiences onto them. The biographical construct becomes a mirage shared by the biographer and subject, with the truth living somewhere inside the mirror. Jenn Shapland spent years searching for identity and meaning amid the debris of Carson McCullers's life, and this hypnotic book approximates her transformation."
"The dizzyingly sensational elements of this taut thriller are wired together to light up the brain's pleasure centers like a short-circuited jackpot machine. An international syndicate of assassins works all angles of a diamond smuggling conspiracy that culminates in an iconic round of extreme dental torture. This is the Holocaust revenge fantasy that once and for all declares that it isn't safe to be a Nazi."
"The landscape of Oklahoma is so flat and wide open that some days it seems possible to be sucked into the vastness of the sky. During the Great Depression, these infinite skies were dyed black with the windswept topsoil from America's failing farms, and blinding dirt descended on the ruined lands for years. In "The Worst Time", Timothy Egan laments the policies and practices that caused the Dust Bowl and eulogizes the lives it tore apart."
"The Donner Party was condemned to death long before they tearfully bit into their first charred morsel of human flesh. They were deceived by profiteering charlatans, doomed by the dispassionate cruelty of nature, and betrayed by their own hubris from the start. In this lyrical history, Daniel James Brown maneuvers unflinchingly through one of the most desperate chapters in the American story."
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"Dessa is a rapper, a jazz singer, a philosopher queen, a rattlesnake, and an active volcano. This collection is a gunpowder tonic of furious psychic energy that remixes and redefines the potential of personal narrative. Each of these essays should end with a mic drop."
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"Liz Phair is infamous for her unflinching honesty in the face of taboo. From the naked candor of Exile in Guyville to the raw text of Horror Stories, the confetti queen of alt-rock has made a career of stripping away the glamour from life in the limelight. The nonlinear essays that constitute this hyper-literate memoir are intimate, painful, and at times shameful, but these are the achingly true memories that roughly approximate a human life."
"Cleansed by fire and forgotten by time, the Overlook Hotel still has its hooks in Danny Torrance decades after his father rampaged through its haunted corridors. Scarred and sobered by a life spent running from his ghosts, the shining has dimmed within him, but, when a gifted child is threatened by a consortium of supernatural evil, he is given a rare chance at redemption. Danny must shine one last time or succumb to darkness forever."
"What is the measure of life? The accomplishments one achieves throughout its course, indifferently checked off like items on an itinerary? The experiences one shares with one's fellow man, lost to time as precise memory becomes indistinct nostalgia? Or is it something more -- something that can flow from one being to another, something that can be calculated and metered out arithmetically? The space vampires can measure life, and the space vampires can take it away."
"Thirteen stories describe thirteen bewitching landscapes in this strange cartography of fear. Familiar terrain transforms into lurid phantasmagoria, and nostalgia is corrupted by malevolent pandemonium. This is a world where death is a mirage, and illusions are sharper than facts. Joe Hill, as always, shines on."
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"The Year of the Monkey lives in the places where the abstract brushes against reality. Patti Smith's hypnotic novel of loss, confusion, and longing propels its inhabitants - both invented and achingly real - across bleached landscapes, barreling through candy wrapper logic toward an inevitable, timeless unknown. The fugue poetry of the narrative spreads like ivy across the disorienting architecture of an absurd year."
The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel That Scandalized the World (Hardcover)
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The abduction of Sally Horner is a grand tragedy in and of itself. A little girl is taken from her home and smuggled torturously across the country over the course of two years, only to become a tabloid scandal upon rescue. The most surreal fold in the story, however, is how an obscure Russian-American author twisted these headlines into one of the most celebrated novels of the twentieth century. In "The Real Lolita", Sarah Weinman details this bizarre saga with narrative expertise, detailed research, and, above all, respect for the often sidelined victims of circumstance.
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"The Apology" is Eve Ensler's speculative memoir of her father, her greatest influence, her abuser. This groundbreaking work of epistolary catharsis is written from the negative space beyond death but within the agonizing grasp of memory, granting simultaneous spiritual absolution to both tyrant and victim. This profound exercise in forgiveness leads us inexorably down the path toward total self-acceptance.
"The great fish moved silently through the night water, propelled by short sweeps of its crescent tail." So begins the calm, measured narration that launched a thousand nightmares, pumping brackish dread through the veins of a generation. Peter Benchley's abyssal masterpiece dissects the deep-seated paranoia that swims just beneath the surface of any close-knit community and shows that nothing tears a small town apart like itself. Or maybe a giant, man-eating shark.
Stephen King's classic meditation on the fragility of the human psyche and the quickening madness of isolation is as haunting today as in its conception. The mundane and the macabre are expertly interwoven in ever-tightening braids throughout the novel to fabricate a frozen tapestry of supernatural suspense. Drink deeply of the red rum, and allow the undisputed master of horror to enchant you with his intoxicating prose.
The piecemeal redemption of Helene Stapinski's outlaw family roughly approximates Jersey City's troubled ascent to legitimacy from its inception as a city of smokestacks and vice to "America's Golden Door". When casual graft was the rule of the day and knowing whose palms to grease spelled the difference between poverty and cornucopia, the author's family was embroiled in the same urban corruption that caricatured New Jersey for generations. Five-Finger Discount chronicles Helene Stapinski's life from within a criminal enterprise and what comes after.
A Tribe Called Quest spent thirty years exploring the instinctive rhythm of consciousness, swimming through the low end up to the boom, the bip, the boom bip. Now Hanif Abdurraqib has written a love letter to that same, subconscious beat of life. But how do you write a letter to a feeling? You address it to the ones who make you feel it, the ones who make you feel like you can kick it. This is the finest piece of literary criticism ever put into writing.
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Easy Rawlins just needs to make his mortgage payment. Being a decorated war hero doesn't count for much in segregated Los Angeles in 1948, so, when Easy is laid off from his factory job, he doesn't ask too many questions about an opportunity for fast money. Thrust into an unfamiliar world of double-dealing gangsters and killer cops on the take, he has to teach himself to be a private eye if he wants to keep his life. In this urgent, neo-noir thriller, the pages turn so fast they might catch fire.
"Every city has its own history, its own personality, and its own magic. When a city is born, its particular enchantments draw some people and repel others as it perpetually recreates itself in its own, dynamic image. New York City was born fighting. In THE CITY WE BECAME, the incomparable N.K. Jemisin weaves a transfixing incantation out of subways and vandals, tourists and gods, the undeniable past and the unimaginable future."
"SULA is a smoldering furnace that brightens without heat. It illuminates daily, annual, and generational sorrow but does not provide comfort and will not apologize for its lack of hospitality. It is beautiful, and it is horrible. It is grief and mercy and joy and triumph and death. SULA is the perfectly flawed emblem of what it means to be alive."
"With the muted nihilism of a caged dog's soft growl, Eileen Dunlop's quiet transgressions against her own stifled existence betray ferocious potential. Trapped in a world of cruel anonymity, she indulges in tiny depravities and thought crimes, resigned to live and die and nothing else. Then something changes. Ottessa Moshfegh's seething debut demonstrates that it's never too late to burn everything to the ground."
"Everything in this book is true. Everything in this book is false. Everything in this book is meaningless. Everything in this book is true, and everything in this book is false. Everything in this book is true, and everything in this book is meaningless. Everything in this book is false, and everything in this book is meaningless. Everything in this book is true, and everything in this book is false, and everything in this book is meaningless."
"John Waters - the chairman of trash, the vulgar visionary, the orchestrator of the obscene - has spent a lifetime collecting all the saccharine and vile experiences that life can hack up. Cataloged in this sickeningly sentimental volume are an array of misfits and mutants that this mad misanthrope calls heroes. "Role Models" is a genuinely sweet love letter to all the deviants and degenerates that make the human experience tolerable."
"Samuel R. Delany's prophetic allegory of interstellar diplomacy and cosmic attraction is an ocean of linguistic philosophy and fluid hierarchical constructs ingeniously tucked into a lively space-pocalypse kiddie pool. Narrated in multiple, conflicting alien syntaxes and spanning conceptually disjointed galaxies, this unabashedly gay, proudly bizarre, Afrofuturist epic is difficult to get into but impossible to leave."
"Tragedy plus time is the formula. In the United States, there is perhaps no greater tragedy than the cultural annihilation of the Native population, and the ensuing comedy has had hundreds of years to fester. Through exhaustive interviews with tribal historians, Native performers, and the fans who travel to reservations across the country to see them, Kliph Nesteroff expertly chronicles the neglected story of a marginalized people transcending oppression by ruthlessly making fun of it."