Only Nick Tosches, bestselling author of Dino and The Devil and Sonny Liston, could have woven this irresistible tale: part mystery, part biography, part meditation on the meaning and power of music.

A forgotten singer from the early days of jazz is at the center of this riveting narrative. For twenty years, Nick Tosches searched for facts about the life of Emmett Miller, a yodeling blackface performer whose songs prefigured jazz, country, blues, and much of the popular music of the twentieth century. Beginning with a handful of 78-rpm records and ending at a tombstone in a Macon, Georgia graveyard, Tosches pieces together a life—and illuminates the spirit of musicmakers from Cab Calloway to Bob Dylan, from Homer to the Rolling Stones.

This is a brilliant, inspired journey by one of the most original writers at work today.

Sonny Liston took on the American Dream - and lost

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.

His mob connections and his violent drunkenness made him an unpopular but feared champion; and when he lost his title to Muhammad Ali with barely a struggle, no one, least of all Liston, seemed to care. He had begun his descent into the depths which would only end with his mysterious death ...

In prose as hard-hitting as Liston's left hook, Nick Tosches excavates the life of Sonny Liston from the murky underworld which never let him go.

'The greatest rock 'n' roll biography ever written' Rolling Stone 'You're lookin' at a livin' legend.' He said, and then fell silent for a moment. 'Y'know, that really worries me. I always thought a legend was somethin' dead.' The tormented life of Jerry Lee Lewis is the most fabled in rock 'n' roll history. Demon-shadowed and God-fearing, his relentless, all-consuming pursuit of self-destruction clouded his life and his music. Born in deep south Louisiana and raised on the Old Testament, 'The Killer' was continually torn between a harsh Pentecostal God and the worship of alcohol, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. Nick Tosches's electrifying account chronicles the monumental highs and lows of the ever indomitable and ever wild Jerry Lee, who rises to dizzying heights as a rock 'n' roll icon, only to lose it time and time again to his inner demons. Searing, mythic and gloriously written, Hellfire is an evocative, audacious journey into the soul of rock 'n' roll itself. 'The finest book ever written about a rock 'n' roll performer' - Greil Marcus 'The best rock-and-roll biography ever written' - Newsday 'Probably the best, certainly the most readable, account of a rock performer's life' - Guardian 'A work of art' - The Boston Globe

A raw and blazing novel by "the single, most brain-searingly dangerous man of letters. Read him at your peril." (Anthony Bourdain)
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.

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.

Also Available as an eBook

In this exuberantly acclaimed bestseller, Nick Tosches tells the tale of two odysseys: the efforts of Dante Alighieri to weave out of the grossness of his own humanity a poem that contains the sum of the world's wisdom and the very breath of the divine, and the deadly struggle, seven centuries later, to possess an object of inestimable value—the manuscript of The Divine Comedy written in Dante's own hand.

Widely hailed as a work of astounding audacity and beauty, the novel draws on Nick Tosches's vast scholarship about the Middle Ages and an equally intimate knowledge of the most degenerate lowlifes of New York's toughest streets.

"As invigorating as any journalist writing in America today....Where Dead Voices Gather is Nick Tosches at his best."
-Allen Barra, Wall Street Journal

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.

Nick Tosches spent twenty years searching for facts about Emmett Miller, the yodeling blackface performer whose songs prefigured jazz, country, blues, and much of the popular music of the twentieth century. Starting with a handful of 78 rpm records and ending at a graveyard in Macon, Georgia, Tosches chronicles a remarkable journey of discovery that illuminates Miller's life, his legacy, and the world of American popular music.

'Once upon a time, when New York City lived and breathed, there was a man marked for death, like us all ...' Arnold Rothstein was one of the most mysterious figures in Manhattan's history: a godfather of organized crime - rumoured to have fixed baseball's World Series - yet a peer of the Morgans and Rockefellers. But one night in 1928 he was shot in the stomach and died shortly afterwards, refusing to speak a word concerning his own murder. Nick Tosches jumps feet first into Rothstein's life to lay bare his legacy - to New York and to the whole Western world - and to try and make some sense of what the 'king of the Jews' means to us. What we get back is an angry howl right out of the tortured heart of America itself.

Long before Elvis Presley entered Sam Phillips's Sun Records studio in 1954, rock'n' roll was being performed and recorded by the likes of Big Joe Turner, Louis Jordan, Wynonie Harris, the Clovers, the Dominoes, the Midnighters, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, Wanda Jackson, and Johnny Ace. More than just a series of shrewd and evocative portraits of these and sixteen other performers, this book is also a paean to a forsaken time of relentless excess, sudden ruin, and fierce music. For this edition, the author has contributed a new listing of recent CD reissues. From 1945 to 1955, from Chinese hillbillies to Elvis's long-lost twin brother, here are the Unsung Heroes of Rock'n' Roll.

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.

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.