Mike Sager's bestselling debut collection brings pop culture's seamy underbelly into sharp focus. It brings together nineteen of Sager's greatest true crime stories, including "The Devil and John Holmes," which inspired the classic movies Boogie Nights, with Mark Wahlberg and Wonderland with Val Kilmer. "The Martyrdom of Veronica Guerin" became a Disney film starring Cate Blanchett.Says E! Online: "You know those engrossing books that keep you up all night? Don't pick this one up i...

"Janet Cooke was a warning shot, a harbinger of all kinds of journalistic scandals to come." —Howard Kurtz, author and media criticJanet Cooke caused one of the biggest scandals in the history of journalism when her Pulitzer Prize-winning article, about an eight-year-old heroin addict, turned out to be a fabrication. Cooke, a reporter for the Washington Post, worked under the legendary editors Ben Bradlee and Bob Woodward. Her disgrace was a jarring wakeup call for the news industr...

Some say he was a breakthrough academic and visionary shaman. Others say he was a sham. Either way, Carlos Castaneda shaped a generation of mystical thinkers and magic mushroom eaters.In 1968, at the height of the psychedelic age, Castaneda published The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, the first of twelve books describing his apprenticeship to an Indian shaman, and his journeys to the “separate reality” of the sorcerers’ worlds.Like Herman Hesse’s Steppenwo...

*Now updated with new cover, new interior art, and vintage movie posters.“John Holmes was every man’s gigolo, a polyester smoothie with a sparse mustache, a flying collar and lots of buttons undone. He wasn’t threatening. He chewed gum and overacted. He took a lounge singer’s approach to sex, deliberately gentle, ostentatiously artful, a homely guy with a pinkie ring and a big dick who was convinced he was every woman’s dream.”John Curtis Holmes had the longest, most prolif...

"So where do we start? I remember when we did The Dirt, the Mötley Crüe book, I was interviewed at The Grand Havana Room in Beverly Hills. A lot of people think I didn't get to say much in The Dirt. It's probably true. I didn't read it. I'm not that big a talker. Some people can f*ckin' talk ... eat up all the oxygen in a room in no time flat. I don't tend to run my mouth. It's b*llshit. All those years in rehab and counseling--the talking cure? I can't say I really got that much out of it...

"[A] dark D.C. tale with . . . an addictive neo-noir sensibility" by the award-winning journalist and New York Times–bestselling author of Tattoos & Tequila ( Publishers Weekly).With a pretty wife, a new baby, and a job reporting for the Washington Herald, Jonathan Seede is the picture of urban respectability. But a secret freelance project is drawing him into places most people never dare to go. Just ten blocks from the White Ho...

The Rise and Fall of a Super Freak: And Other True Stories of Black Men Who Made History, is a pocket collection of stories, by award-winning journalist Mike Sager, about American Black men whose lives significantly affected the direction and zeitgeist of American culture.Rick James, known to all as Super Freak, was the first to wear African-inspired braids; his powerful funk beats powered the rollicking 1980s and can still be heard in music today. Sager met music's King of Funk wi...

The Pope of Pot: And Other True Stories of Marijuana and Related High Jinks is a pocket collection, by the award-winning journalist (and former Rolling Stone drugs correspondent) Mike Sager, highlighting his dispatches from the cannabis underground.In "When Should a Man Stop Smoking Weed?" Sager looks back on a half-century of pot-smoking, starting on a humid night in summer at age 12. "Marijuana has served as a great equalizer, a frequent teacher, and a pleasant companion," he wri...

Mike Sager has made a career "finding the quotidian within the extreme, the tender amid the grotesque," according to award-winning author and popular Columbia Journalism School professor Sam Freedman.A Boy and His Dog in Hell collects 19 stories that Sager—a best-selling author and veteran of the Washington Post, Rolling Stone, and Esquire—calls "my milestones, pieces that have defined and distinguished my work over forty-some years of journalism—adventures, high jinks, near-death ...

In the summer of 1988, about six months into the First Palestinian Intifada—an uprising by Palestinians against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip—journalist Mike Sager, a Jew, was sent by the Washington Post Sunday Magazine to investigate the human toll of the uprising. While much was known about the political situation at the time, little had been reported about the actual conditions of Palestinians living as refugees in squalid camps on or near lands that were on...

From the start it sounds ridiculous: Go to Tahiti and find Marlon Brando.But the worldwide search for the legendary Method actor, the star of such classic movies as The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, On the Waterfront, and Mutiny on the Bounty, soon becomes an obsession. The story of one man’s coming of age.When we first meet him, Sager is 30 years old, divorce pending, no longer the youngest in the room. Winter is coming. His prospects are dim. After ten years as a journalist,...

Mike Sager has been called “the Beat poet of American Journalism.” Vetville collects the best of his stories about the Marine Corps. Together this tetralogy of long-form pieces charts a life story arc of the modern Devil Dog.It begins at Camp Pendleton, CA, on field exercises with Lieutenant Colonel Bob Sinclair and his BN One-Four—the 1st Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment—as they prepare to invade Afghanistan, the first wave of American combatants sent to war after the deadly terrori...