Best Selling Books by Nick Tosches

A portrait of singer Jerry Lee Lewis details his early life, music, controversial marriage, problems and decline, endurance, and revival in popularity.

Celebrating the dark origins of our most American music, Country reveals a wild shadowland of history that encompasses blackface minstrels and yodeling cowboys; honky-tonk hell and rockabilly heaven; medieval myth and musical miscegenation; sex, drugs, murder; and rays of fierce illumination on Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, and others, famous and forgotten, whose demonology is America''s own. Profusely and superbly illustrated, Country stands as one of the most brilliant explorations of American musical culture ever written.

From dealing blackjack in the small-time gangster town of Steubenville, Ohio, to carousing with the famous "Rat Pack" in a Hollywood he called home, Dean Martin lived in a grandstand, guttering life of booze, broads, and big money. He rubbed shoulders with the mob, the Kennedys, and Hollywood''s biggest stars. He was one of America''s favorite entertainers. But no one really knew him. Now Nick Tosches reveals the man behind the image--the dark side of the American dream. It''s a wild, illuminating, sometimes shocking tale of sex, ambition, heartaches--and a life lived hard, fast, and without apologies.

The anti-Ali, Sonny Liston represents everything that is compelling and terrifying about boxing. An overwhelmingly powerful fighter, Liston rose from a desperately poor childhood to street criminal to world heavyweight champion. He then became the pawn of a series of criminal organizations and was shadowed throughout his life by government investigations, arrests, and the rumor of corruption. The Devil and Sonny Liston is not just the biography of a boxer; it is one of the greatest organized-crime stories ever told and confirms Toschess place as one of the most powerful and original writers of our time. Toschess acclaimed biography of Dean Martin, Dino, sold more than 110,000 copies From the rappers Wu-Tang Clan to writer Thom Jones, people are fascinated by Sonny Liston and by boxing in general. King of the World by David Remnick sold more than 100,000 copies. Tom Cruises Cruise/Wagner Productions is at work on a movie based on this book. A collection of Toschess best writing, The Nick Tosches Reader, is due out in 2000. Tosches is a contributing editor of Vanity Fair.

A forgotten singer from the early days of jazz is at the center of this riveting book -- a narrative that is part mystery, part biography, part meditation on the meaning and power of music.

Deep inside the Vatican library, a priest discovers the rarest and most valuable art object ever found: the manuscript of The Divine Comedy, written in Dante''s own hand. Via Sicily, the manuscript makes its way from the priest to a mob boss in New York City, where a writer named Nick Tosches is called to authenticate the prize. For this writer, the temptation is too great: he steals the manuscript in a last-chance bid to have it all. Some will find it offensive; others will declare it transcendent; it is certain to be the most ragingly debated novel of the decade.

Portrays twenty-five people who made little-known contributions to rock ''n'' roll, and supplies a chronolgy of rock ''n'' roll.

Flamboyant mobster Arnold Rothstein was gambling and money. He was the inspiration for Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby and Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls. It was rumored he masterminded the 1919 World Series fix. He was Mr. Broadway, a king of corruption holding court from his private booth at Lindy''s Restaurant. In this lively, sprawling biography, the inimitable Nick Tosches -- "one of the greatest living American writers" (Dallas Observer) -- examines the myth and extraordinary legacy of Arnold Rothstein. It is an elegy to old New York that places an iconic, larger-than-life criminal kingpin firmly at the center of nothing less than the history of the entire Western world.

A work of dangerous and haunting beauty by America''s last real literary outlaw. Under Tiberius is a thrilling story of crime and deceit involving the man who came to be called Jesus Christ. Deep in the recesses of the Vatican, Nick Tosches unearths a first-century memoir by Gaius Fulvius Falconius, foremost speechwriter for Emperor Tiberius. The codex is profound, proof of the existence of a Messiah who was anything but the one we''ve known -- a shabby and licentious thief. After encountering him in the streets of Judea, Gaius becomes spin doctor to Jesus, and the pair schemes to accrue untold riches by convincing the masses that Jesus is the Son of God. As their marriage of truth and lies is consummated, friendship and wary respect develop between these two grifters. Outrageous and disturbing, Under Tiberius is as black as the ravishing night, shot through with fierce and brilliant light.

An aging New Yorker, a writer named Nick, feels life ebbing out of him. The world has gone to hell and Nick is so sick of it all that he can''t even have a glass of champagne. Then one night he meets a tantalizing young woman who agrees to come back to his apartment. Their encounter is the most strangely extraordinary of his life. Propelled by uncontrollable, primordial desires, he enters a new and unimagined dimension of the forbidden and is filled with a sexual and spiritual ecstasy that is as intense as it is unholy. Suddenly Nick''s senses are alive. He feels strong, unconquerable, beyond all inhibition and earthly morality. He indulges in life''s pleasures, pure and perverse, sublime and dangerous, from the delicate flavors of the perfect tomato to the fleshy beauty of a woman''s thigh. But Nick''s desire to sustain his rapture leads him to a madness and a darkness far greater and dreadful than have ever ridden the demon mares of night. Writing in a lineage that includes Dante, William S. Burroughs, Charles Bukowski, Hubert Selby, Jr., and Hunter S. Thompson, Nick Tosches may be America''s last real literary outlaw -- a fearless, uncensorable seeker of our deepest secret truths and desires, from the basest to the most beautiful. Me and the Devil is outrageous, disturbing, and brilliant, a raw and blazing novel truly unlike any other. Like the man said: Read him at your peril. "A raw and blazing novel by "the single, most brain-searingly dangerous man of letters. Read him at your peril." -- Anthony Bourdain

In 1962, Sonny Liston became boxing''s world heavyweight champion. He was a poor plantation boy and a bruiser for the mob who had done time for armed robbery, but he had fought his way to the top. Those he met in the ring said he was unstoppable, even dangerous. Sonny, however, knew differently.

The author, fueled by romantic, spiritual, and medicinal needs, details his mesmerizing quest--part spiritual, part hallucinogenic--from Europe to Cambodia, in search of the mysterious opium den, ultimately discovering the key to true fulfillment. 20,000 first printing.

Le rock''n''roll n''a pas commencé avec Elvis, c''est ce que montre Nick Tosches en offrant une hallucinante galerie de portraits de ses héros obscurs, tous plus déjantés les uns que les autres : Big Joe Tuner, Screamin'' Jay Hawkins, Louis Prima ou encore Ming et Ling, les rockers chinois.

En una cámara secreta de la biblioteca del Vaticano, aparece el objeto más extraño y valioso jamás des-cubierto: el manuscrito de ?La Divina Comedia?, del puño y letra del mismísimo Dante. El sacerdote que encuentra este tesoro lo envía a su casa en Sicilia, donde cae en manos más terrenales. Y no mucho después, un escritor llamado Nick Tosches, ya cerca de la muerte y preparado para cualquier cosa, recibe la llamada telefónica de un amigo. Hay algo que quiere que vea, un manuscrito que necesita ser examinado para determinar su autenticidad. Tosches reconoce las páginas como lo que son... y se embarca en la aventura más terrorífica de toda su vida.

The Mafia, Asian drug lords, and Wall Street financiers wage an all-out war for control of the world''s multi-billion-dollar heroin trade, while a lawman fights a battle for his own soul

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.

Nick, un écrivain vieillissant, commence à sentir les effets du temps et de la vie qui passe. Comme pour combattre l''inéluctable, il part en quête de jeunes femmes qu''il sait pouvoir impressionner par son raffinement et son érudition. Une nuit, dans un bar de New York, il rencontre l''envoûtante Melissa, avec qui il va vivre une expérience inédite. Mû par une pulsion incontrôlable et quasi animale, il découvre une dimension insoupçonnée d''un plaisir pur et pervers, le goût du sang, et se laisse submerger par une extase spirituelle et sexuelle d''autant plus intense qu''elle est impie. Son corps comme son esprit s''en trouvent étrangement revigorés mais bientôt, la soif qu''il cherche à étancher le plonge dans des ténèbres effrayantes. Avec Moi et le Diable, roman dérangeant et virtuose, cru et furieux, qui revisite avec originalité le thème de l''immortalité et du pacte faustien, Nick Tosches s''impose définitivement comme l''un des derniers hors-la-loi de la littérature. « Un sommet, par l''un des plus grands écrivains actuels. Tosches connaît le diable comme personne... » Keith Richards « Un nouveau chapitre dans l''oeuvre si singulière, et parfois délicieusement perverse, de Nick Tosches. » The New Yorker

Dans un recoin des archives secrètes de la bibliothèque vaticane, Nick Tosches découvre un codex vieux de deux mille ans qui relate les mémoires d''un aristocrate romain : Gaius Fulvius Falconius. Orateur de talent chargé d''écrire les discours de l''empereur Tibère, il tombe un jour en disgrâce et doit s''exiler en Judée. Il y fait la connaissance d''un jeune vagabond juif sans foi ni loi, obsédé par l''argent et le sexe, qui le fascine littéralement. Lui vient alors une idée : faire passer ce jeune homme au charisme indéniable pour le Messie tant attendu... Jésus de Nazareth revu et corrigé par l''auteur du Roi des Juifs : il fallait l''irrévérence et l''érudition de l''un des derniers hors-la-loi de la littérature américaine pour s''emparer d''un tel sujet. Se moquant de la religiosité et la morale, Nick Tosches dérange, choque, bouscule, et confirme une fois de plus sa virtuosité. « Un livre aussi dérangeant qu''irrésistiblement drôle. En un mot : brillant. » Publishers Weekly