The Nick Tosches Reader

by Nick Tosches

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.

Genres: Music, Essays, Nonfiction, Short Stories

624 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2000

About the author

Nick Tosches was an American journalist, novelist, biographer, and poet. His 1982 biography of Jerry Lee Lewis, Hellfire, was praised by Rolling Stone magazine as "the best rock and roll biography ever written."

Reviews

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

really good writer, with incredible essays, but sprinkled with machismo bullshit

[Noah · Rating 5 out of 5]

There's a part in here about fucking his ladyfriend when she had a fever and how awesome it was.

[Chris Horne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful. No one works words over like Tosches.

[Julio The Fox · Rating 5 out of 5]

An American genius, sadly overlooked today. Nick Tosches left this world a legacy of tough-guy prose that would have made Dashell Hammett and Norman Mailer proud and envious. His gift was for the prose portrait, getting inside the mind and borrowing the tongue of his subjects, and his subjects usually gave an "F--U" to the world. Listen Nick climb into Sonny Liston, boxer, mob-client (possibly) and forever to be known as the victim of Cassius Clay/Muhammed Ali in 1964: "What was Sonny supposed to do in the Sixties after he lost to Clay? He was no Black militant. Can you imagine Sonny Listen in a f---ing dashiki?" Other pieces highlight Tosches' Dean Martin biography, "there's either everything inside that head or nothing", and a loving tribute to his master in prose, William Faulkner. Most of these articles first appeared in America's vibrant underground press from the Sixties and Seventies, where Tosches properly belonged. Legitimacy would have killed him, long before disease slayed Saint Nick.

[Ray · Rating 4 out of 5]

With Nick's recent passing, I re-read this collection of his articles, stories and book excerpts. It is my favorite of his books and I have most of them. Almost every piece is prefaced with Nick's introduction . There's a lot of laugh out loud moments!

[Steve Shilstone · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tosches had opinions on pop culture and wasn't shy about expressing them. A marvelous writer.

[Tim · Rating 5 out of 5]

A journey into the mind and heart of a writer like this has its painful moments to be sure, but it also left me feeling provoked and even inspired. I don’t think I have read a “reader” like this that I thought so successfully laid out what an author is all about in his various moods and guises. Usually I avoid those things because the irritating fragments they contain rarely show the greatness which they are capable of; it is usually better to go directly to the best known works. These pieces were selected by Tosches himself, and although I think that an artist is not always the best judge of his own work, at least this way one gets a look at what he himself thinks should be in his reader.

Tosches is a writer of many facets, most of them not very nice. He is in love with sleaze in all of its varieties – the dank, acrid worlds of crime, substance abuse, and falls from grace is what he likes to write about the most. The thinking man’s slimeball, Tosches began his career as a music journalist specializing in country and rock. From there he branched out into poetry, feature articles, fiction, and biography. His true specialty is the area in which the world of scuzz overlaps with the world of entertainment and spectacle, and I would be surprised if anyone has written better about this sort of thing than he has. In this book are many fine pieces describing the lives of those whom fame could not redeem, such as country singer George Jones, Hollywood & Mafia lawyer Sidney Korshak, TV preachers Swaggart and Bakker, and rock writer Lester Bangs. He has written entire books on Jerry Lee Lewis, Sonny Liston, Dean Martin, and financier Michele Sindona – and excerpts from all of these are in the collection.

Tosches makes his presence known and makes it clear that his writings are going to be about his opinions and perceptions. Much of what he expresses is laced with dark sarcasm, and though the taste may be bitter at times, one keeps reading, almost as if reading his stuff was a nasty and hard-to-break little habit. He has no qualms about throwing in a little homophobia and objectification of women; he was a tough kid from Jersey City and still carries some of the values of his youth. When he turns his contemptuous gaze at subjects such as the Iron John men’s movement or the Elvis Presley lives phenomenon, real hilarity and sharp social criticism can be the outcome.

The book is also full of autobiographical sections. Tosches takes us along for a few drunken escapades (he is/was a serious binge drinker), memories of a blue-collar youth, and a few romantic encounters that reek with repressed anger toward women. His imagination tends toward the mythical on occasion, and he has a way of hinting offhandedly at deeper meanings without explaining them. His poetry is spontaneous and formless, mostly it seems blurted out, ringing both funny and soulful (but sometimes just foolish). There were times when I cringed while reading this, but I never wanted to put it down. I realized I was in the presence of an egomaniac, but a true artist – a writer with an impressive vocabulary and a willingness to look deep into the darknesses within himself and others, and to present perceptions that no one else has or could.

[Jerstyn Morehay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thirty years of writing from the dying days of the last century representing the major and minor output -- encompassing early reviews, later journalism, biographies, fiction, poetry, and the frankly unclassifiable -- of the equally storied and defiantly sui generis Nick Tosches. My favorites included pieces on the incendiary Nightmare Alley-by way of-Ma and Pa Kettle Go To Town pop performer Jerry Lee Lewis, his equally hellfire-burnt double-first cousin, the disgraced evangelist preacher Jimmy (Lee) Swaggart, the powerful but shadowy mob and entertainment lawyer Sidney Korshak, and the monstrous heavyweight champion Sonny Liston. All listed above, invoked by the author like an Old Testament figure prophesying doom, are not so much about the people themselves as what those individuals represent on an almost cosmic level. Christ, this mother could write.

[Sean Thomas Sullivan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Let me admit I skipped and jumped around the stories in this book, but by the authors own admission he often stole from himself, repeating ideas, word choices, etc, so felt no compulsion to read every story. That said I enjoyed this book. The author's voice sounds like a buddy I am listening to over a beer or three. The language combines realism and absurdity to create very readable prose. Probably a more exciting book ten or twenty years ago, but still worth checking out.

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nick's not for everyone, but this won't take up a lot of room on your shelf, and it will save you the trouble of buying a time machine so you can go back and scour the magazine stands every week looking for something he's written. There's gold in here, but it's not something one reads cover to cover.

[Matt Hudak · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some hits, some misses - the collected madness of Nick Tosches.

[Cheyenne · Rating 3 out of 5]

The life career of a writer. Really great.

[Harris Reiss · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book sits on my bedside table. The stories are easy, compelling, exciting, rock and roll, historic.....constant reread.

[JP · Rating 4 out of 5]

No one writes like Tosches. His sentences knock the wind out of me. If you listen, you'll hear a 'wow' in that wind. It makes forgiving the excess testosterone easy.

[Dave Quam · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the greats.