The Nick Tosches Reader

by Nick Tosches

Book Overview

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...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0306809699
• ISBN13: 9780306809699
• Release Date: April 2000
• Publisher: Da Capo Press
• Length: 624 Pages
• Weight: 1.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.1" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

In the hand of Tosches

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

A writers writers writers writers livers writers life

Read this, and then get all his other books. Die Happy. This is power writing of the kind we need more of. Tosches' gift is an ability to look in the places where the stupid assumptions that cover things over say don't look, and then to say it sensuously, joyously, marvelously, with accuracies of his own making. Read this, then get all his other books. Live Happy.

Newark

I've always enjoyed Nick Tosches. I read "Country" years ago in a Nashville library; I halfway expected to get arrested. "Unsung Heroes of Rock 'n' Roll" never fails to lift my spirits--it's one of the funniest things ever written. His novels are all right, too, and I recommend "Cut Numbers," the paperback edition of which I just bought and read in one evening. And, of course, I never travel without my hardcover of "Dino." This collection has a little too much of his poetry for my taste (although I relish his dissection of Raymond Carver's poetry), and stuff like "Frankie, Part 1" doesn't quite make it for me. The piece on George Jones is just about the best thing here and worth the price of the book. "The Sea's Endless, Awful Rhythm & Me Without Even a Dirty Picture," from "Stranded" (an otherwise undistinguished collection of essays on desert-island records), is great too. I myself never bought any of that peace-and-love jive, and I am a fan of Jerry Lee Lewis and late-'40s rhythm-and-blues, so I find Mr. Tosches a kindred spirit, even though he's from Newark and I grew up in Tennessee. He's a great prose stylist and, I've heard tell, a snappy dresser as well. I once worked with a very pretentious lady editor, from Seattle, who, most annoyingly, liked to refer to Raymond Carver as "Ray" (I think she workshopped with him once or something). I made her a copy of Tosches's piece on Carver, "Please Be Quiet-Please," and I never had to suffer her conversation again.

THE NICK OF TIME

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.

A unique voice that you gotta hear!

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.