Jerry Stahl earned a cult following with his gritty and fearless memoir, Permanent Midnight, a best-selling junkie confessional that drew critical raves. His subsequent fiction, including Perv: A Love Story, Plainclothes Naked, I, Fatty, and a collection of stories Love Without, established him as a sometimes disturbing, sometimes hilarious, but always unsparing and utterly original voice. Thomas Mallon, writing in The New Yorker called him "a better than Burroughs virtuoso." James Ellroy dubbed him "America's hipster bard." And Entertainment Weekly praised his "brilliantly demented riffs." His latest novel is Pain Killers (William Morrow), which reveals a side of America's underbelly as no one but Stahl can. Also a gifted TV and film writer, Stahl makes an excellent speaker for universities, writing and film programs, libraries, literary arts and lectures series.
With Pain Killers Stahl's legion of avid fans can celebrate the author's return to form in this savagely funny, darkly satiric saga of America's underbelly and the two people - Manny and his husband-killing ex-wife, Tina - who must navigate the strange, violent shoals of state prison, neo-Nazis, human experiments, Christian call girls and, weirdest of all, true love that binds them for life. Stahl and the book have been featured in the San Francisco Chronicle, USA Today, Flavorwire, and L.A. Decider.
Stahl launched his publishing career with a Pushcart Prize and his fiction and non-fiction have appeared everywhere from The Village Voice to Hustler, from Esquire and Details to Playboy and the New York Times, among other places. He has also written extensively for television and film, including the highest rated episodes of CSI. Permanent Midnight was made into a film starring Ben Stiller and Maria Bello. I, Fatty, a faux-memoir of silent film star Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, has been optioned by Johnny Depp. Stahl is currently completing a movie about Ernest Hemingway for HBO and James Gandolfini. He is also adapting the HarperCollins book, Cooked, about Chef Jeff Henderson, for Sony & Will Smith, and working with Ben Stiller on a movie about Oscar Levant.
Stahl is a graduate of Columbia University. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College and studied with Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff. Originally from Pittsburgh, PA, Stahl lives in Los Angeles, CA.
Praise for Pain Killers:
"From the opening gut punch this book had me laughing and turning pages. Jerry Stahl is Thomas Berger's wicked stepson and his new novel is a tour de force."
-- Tom Franklin, author of Smonk, Hell at the Breech, and Poachers
"If you happen to have a deeply twisted sense of what's funny, Stahl will tickle."
-- Los Angeles Times
"Pain Killers is a tale best read with a bottle of Scotch at hand. Author Jerry Stahl is perhaps the most visceral writer working in fiction; he's not afraid to look in the darkest passages of the American soul and report, verbatim, what he sees. This story -- of Nazis (Josef Mengele and those Americans who collaborated with Hitler's fiends), the U.S. prison system and love in a dangerous time -- coheres through his sheer will to bind the various story parts. It's often brilliant, always compelling, but not for those cozy up to a book with a cup of chamomile tea."
-- Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
"Stahl is no stranger to smashing social taboos, and his trademark blend of ballsy, blacker-than-black humor and wry social commentary lets him find humor in the third Reich."
-- Publishers Weekly, starred review
"Stahl fires off great, if rude, one-liners while raising disturbing questions."
-- Kirkus Reviews
Praise for Perv - A Love Story:
"Imagine Holden Caulfield on bad acid. . . . Perv - A Love Story is the definitive young outsider story, told only as Stahl can tell it."
-- Ben Stiller
"Dig it: Perv - A Love Story is a beautifully wrought and twisted ode to freaks, beatniks, hopheads, and the wild-assed and strange everywhere. Jerry Stahl is the American hipster bard."
-- James Ellroy, author of L.A. Confidential and My Dark Places
"Jerry Stahl's Perv is Phillip Roth in a head-on collision with Harry Crews. Naked, ugly and funny. Hard to swallow, hard to put down."
-- Eric Bogosian, author of Suburbia
"This is a beautiful book. There are parts that had me laughing out loud, yet it is a tragic story of extraordinary tenderness. The prose is flawless whether he is relating what is happening at the moment or flowing through space and time, which he does with perfection."
-- Hubert Selby Jr., author of Last Exit to Brooklyn
"It is one thing, fine and rare, to write from the heart. It is another thing, finer and rarer, to write from the secret unutterable chambers of the heart. Jerry Stahl, whose words are as cool and deadly striking as a cottonmouth in the moonless dark night of the soul, does just that. No one who reads him will remain quite the same, for in that dangerous night, amid its horror and wicked laughter, lie the powers of a writer as brave as he is gifted. Jerry Stahl is the real thing."
-- Nick Tosches, author of Dino and Hellfire
"Full of really filthy, really great writing. Perv makes me want to sleep with my great-aunt. I don't know why."
-- Peter Farrelly, writer-director of There's Something About Mary
"Jerry Stahl's work fills the gap in American literature left void since the death of the late, great Terry Southern."
-- Jim Carroll, author of The Basketball Diaries and Void, Of Course
"Jerry Stahl's scarified heart is river-deep and mountain-high: a wild-child running marathons in the dark, he holds a torch-song high in the sweetness of his hand."
-- Bruce Wagner, author of I'm Losing You
"Utterly charming! Surely the most registered evocation of youthful phalli and pudenda since George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss."
-- Mark Leyner, author of My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist
"Perv - A Love Story is a hysterical trip back to every ugly moment you want to forget about 'growing up' and 'coming of age'. The writing is wicked and delicious, reminiscent of the late, great Terry Southern. Jerry Stahl is truly twisted, truly gifted."
-- Legs McNeil, author of Please Kill Me
"[Stahl's] brilliantly demented riffs beg to be read - or screamed - aloud."
-- Entertainment Weekly
"Perv is a timeless tale of teenage displacement and, weirdly enough, star-gazing wonder."
-- Salon
"Perv never lets up until its death-rattling, orgasmic climax. If we take one thing away from this exceptional tale, it's that perversity is a norm, a healthy - if unhappy - response to the sickness of modernity."
-- Paper
"Always entertaining, Perv makes the typical teenage experience seem like an episode of Little House on the Prairie."
-- Austin Chronicle
Praise for Plainclothes Naked:
"Jerry Stahl's writing will flip you - flip you for real."
-- Benicio Del Toro
"Raw and devilishly raunchy."
-- Vanity Fair
"Absurdist postmodern pulp fiction. . . Will unplug your mind."
-- Elle Magazine
"Plainclothes Naked is a page-turner."
-- Maxim
"Bare-ass hilarious. . . A wonderfully sick comic masterpiece of the hard-boiled genre."
-- Paper Magazine
"...the new king of black humor. . . Plainclothes Naked [is] a hallucinogenic potboiler."
-- New York Post
"[Stahl] goes for the reader's funny bone via the jugular vein. . . fast-paced and truly comical."
-- Phoenix New Times