The Nick Tosches Reader

A real tough guy with A LOT of excellent fiction, interviews and features- my favorite might be his Vanity Fair piece on finding The Last Opium Den- I don't think it's included in this collection, but it is available on Scribd. I'd get all of these.

The print is blurry, the cover is blurry, as well. It's a poor photocopy on photocopy paper. I do not recommend this vendor. The text by Tosches is awesome, though. Whatever. Don't buy from this vendor.

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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 willingess to look deep into the darknesses within himself and others, and to present perceptions that no one else has or could.

Nick Tosches has a hard voice to criticise, because it's based on a pose of having been to weirder places, seen weirder stuff and basically having lived a harder, darker and weirder life than the mere reader can possibly compete with. This is, in short, the voice of a true son of a certain and honourable school of journalism. It is not, however, the only way of talking about certain subjects. There are other ways, and other voices, some of them more persuasive than his.For example: when Tosches was occasionally called upon by Rolling Stone to review records in the early 70s, he quite often regarded the assignment with such contempt that he didn't bother to listen to the record in question, but made up the review out of his own head. A case in point is his self-confessedly fictional review of Black Sabbath's 'Paranoid', one of the greatest albums in hard rock, but which Tosches couldn't be bothered to listen to because...well, because he was some kind of a cultural snob, plain and simple. His 'review' of it is included here, without even the merest hint of regret that he failed to spot how brilliant an album it is. I imagine that even now he regards it as beneath his notice.Elsewhere, there is much writing that's high on octane but low on substance. There is little, in short, that lovers of music will want to reread, given Tosches' all-too-apparent but seldom openly stated contempt for the music he is mostly writing about. Much of the rest of the book is more or less entertaining, but little of it has the tragic depth of masterpieces such as his stunning Dean Martin biography 'Dino', or his equally scalding Sonny Liston bio 'Night Train', each of them heartbreaking chronicles of spiritual collapse. The main exception is the original article that gave rise to 'Night Train', which is arguably more perfectly concise and controlled than the actual book.I have thought long and hard about why I find Tosches an ultimately depressing and dispiriting writer, and I think it has something to do with the fact that he has no real imagination. He has, to a phenomenal degree, a journalist's ability to think himself into his subject's world, and most journalists should envy how good he is at that, even if they mostly don't. But what he doesn't have is the visionary capacity to imagine a world other than this one; he respects it when it's possessed by established poets, but sneers at it when it's claimed by rock performers like Jim Morrison or Ozzy Osbourne, because Tosches is too cynical to believe that anything in rock'n'roll can carry that sort of ambition. (To be fair, Tosches would never be taken in by fakers like U2. But his dismissal of the overblown and pretentious but hugely entertaining Doors is as unimaginative as Greil Marcus preferring Randy Newman to Leonard Cohen.) Having said that, Tosches is not always intimidated into worshipping writers just because they're writers. As another reviewer pointed out, his full-on demolition job of Raymond Carver's poetry is one of the hilarious and gleeful ventures in literary criticism ever written.Don't overestimate Nick Tosches; he is one of the two or three supreme chroniclers of American lowlife. But just because he understands disaster so well, doesn't mean he can tell you much about consummation.

This book is Fantastic ! This guy doesn't know HOW to write a boring page. This book has a lot of really interesting stuff in it. I don't have but about 4 of his books so I bought this to get an inking of other things... more than an inkling here tho.. Great Big thing