I Should Have Known Better is a sequel to the sleeper hit I'm Open to Anything (2019), expanding the original's scope and ambition. The new book has been produced entirely with the support of a crowdfunding campaign that reached five figures and 150% funding, an unprecedented accomplishment for a literary novel.I Should Have Known Better's first person narrator, while working at a dead-end job in Los Angeles during the mid-1990s, reconnects with his best friend Moira, recently returned from Central America, and makes a new friend, Bernie, who teaches the history of photography. The two of them convince him to pursue a master's degree as a way of escaping the unrewarding life of a video store clerk. Once the narrator is exposed to an academic environment, he takes a dim view of the education that art school has to offer, but is happy to meet a group of talented fellow students who become close friends. He encounters a number of art world figures, ranging from the brilliant to the abject, who disabuse him of his illusions. The narrator has his most instructive experiences off campus, especially a love affair with the handsome and mercurial Temo, an insolent rich kid who leads a double life. Together they explore their sexual limits in scenes of bracing explicitness.I Should Have Known Better bears witness to the last gasp of Los Angeles bohemia at the end of the twentieth century. The novel paints precise portraits of inspired eccentrics devoted to pursuing their dreams, "shopping artists" who believe in nothing but hedonism, and latter-day leftists who find themselves directionless after the fall of communism. Above all, the book pays tribute to the impulsive experiments and intense friendships of youth.

I Should Have Known Better

Literature & Fiction

Jones, William E.

Erotica

We Heard You Like Books

Equine Sports Medicine

Science & Math

Technology

Lea, Febiger

The 1990s were a continuation of the criticism of churches (institutions) that was obvious for three decades in America. William E. Jones addresses such questions in this book.

Forces at work: External influences affecting the mission of churches of Christ

Resource Publications

Albright, Verne R., Jones, William E.

The Long Way to Los Gatos

Biographies & Memoirs

Albright, Verne R.

Travelers & Explorers

Amigo Pubns Inc

Boyd McDonald (1925-1993) had the makings of a successful career in the 1950s--an education at Harvard, jobs at Time/Life and IBM--but things didn't turn out as planned. After 20 years of resentful conformity and worsening alcoholism, McDonald dried out, pawned all of his suits, and went on welfare. It was then that his life truly began. From a tiny room in a New York SRO hotel, McDonald published Straight to Hell, a series of chapbooks collecting readers' "true homosexual experiences." Following the example of Alfred Kinsey, McDonald obsessively pursued the truth about sex between men just as gay liberation began to tame America's sexual outlaws for the sake of legal recognition. Admired by such figures as Gore Vidal and William S. Burroughs, Straight to Hell combined a vigorous contempt for authority with a keen literary style, and was the precursor of queer 'zines decades later. William E. Jones conducted in-depth interviews with many people from McDonald's life, including friends, colleagues, and most unexpectedly, family members who revealed that he was a loving uncle who doted on his nieces and great-nieces. A complex portrait drawn from a wealth of previously unpublished material, True Homosexual Experiences: Boyd McDonald and Straight to Hell is the first biography devoted to a key figure of the American underground.

True Homosexual Experiences: Boyd McDonald and Straight to Hell

Arts & Literature

A perverse and explicit new take on the coming of age novel, William E. Jones’s I’m Open to Anything explores bohemian Southern California of the late 1980s and early 90s, before gentrification ruined everything. The book’s narrator flees a crumbling industrial wasteland in the Midwest and finds himself in sunny Los Angeles without a car, working in a neighborhood video store and spending many hours watching films. He explores his adopted city and befriends a number of men, most of them immigrants, who teach him the finer points of sex. He acquires the skill of fisting, giving his partners intense pleasure, and at the same time hearing the stories of their lives. They too have fled their hometowns: one to escape torture at the hands of a Salvadoran death squad; another to study anthropology after years of wandering and religious questioning. Alternating between explicit scenes of kinky sex and intimate conversations about matters of life and death, I’m Open to Anything is a porno novel of rare ambition and humor. The book recalls Olympia Press’s heyday, when authors made quick money churning out dirty books, but couldn’t hide the intellectual obsessions that made them writers in the first place. William E. Jones’s previous book, True Homosexual Experiences (also published by We Heard You Like Books), a biography of Straight to Hell’s iconoclastic editor Boyd McDonald, celebrates the frank, raunchy language of the first queer ’zine. Jones brings the same unsparing and profane attitude to I’m Open to Anything, his debut novel.

I'm Open to Anything

Humor & Satire

Horse Trader: No Way to Make a Living (Two Centries in America)

History

Americas

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

The life, times, and mysteries of Fred Halsted, gay porn's first film auteur.
Fred Halsted's L.A. Plays Itself (1972) was gay porn's first masterpiece: a sexually explicit, autobiographical, experimental film whose New York screening left even Salvador Dalí repeatedly muttering “new information for me.” Halsted, a self-taught filmmaker, shot the film over a period of three years in a now-vanished Los Angeles, a city at once rural and sleazy. Although his cultural notoriety at one point equaled that of Kenneth Anger or Jack Smith, Halsted's star waned in the 1980s with the emergence of a more commercial gay-porn industry. After the death from AIDS of his long-time partner, lover, spouse (and tormentor) Joey Yale in 1986, Halsted committed suicide in 1989. In Halsted Plays Himself, acclaimed artist and filmmaker William E. Jones documents his quest to capture the elusive public and private personas of Halsted―to zero in on an identity riddled with contradictions. Jones assembles a narrative of a long-gone gay lifestyle and an extinct Hollywood underground, when independent films were still possible, and the boundary between experimental and pornographic was not yet established. The book also depicts what sexual liberation looked like at a volatile point in time―and what it looked like when it collapsed.

Halsted Plays Himself (Semiotext(e) Native Agents)

Arts & Photography

Photography & Video

Semiotext[e]

The life, times, and mysteries of Fred Halsted, gay porn's first film auteur, in a new, updated, and expanded edition.\nFred Halsted’s L.A. Plays Itself (1972) was gay porn’s first masterpiece: a sexually explicit, autobiographical, experimental film whose New York screening left even Salvador Dalí repeatedly muttering “new information for me.” Halsted, a self-taught filmmaker, shot the film over a period of three years in a now-vanished Los Angeles, a city at once rural and sleazy. Although his cultural notoriety at one point equaled that of Kenneth Anger or Jack Smith, Halsted’s star waned in the 1980s with the emergence of a more commercial gay porn industry. After the death from AIDS of his long-time partner, lover, spouse (and tormentor) Joey Yale in 1986, Halsted committed suicide in 1989. In Halsted Plays Himself, acclaimed artist and filmmaker William E. Jones documents his quest to capture the elusive public and private personas of Halsted—to zero in on an identity riddled with contradictions. Jones assembles a narrative of a long-gone gay lifestyle and an extinct Hollywood underground, when independent films were still possible, and the boundary between experimental and pornographic was not yet established. The book also depicts what sexual liberation looked like at a volatile point in time—and what it looked like when it collapsed.\nThe revised and expanded edition of Halsted Plays Himself includes material that came to light since the book’s first publication, including details about the restoration of Halsted’s films by the Museum of Modern Art, the true identities of several key figures in his life, new testimony from family members, and the rediscovery of his feature film Truck It (1973), previously considered lost.

Halsted Plays Himself, expanded edition (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents)

I Didn’t See It Coming is the dark and exciting culmination of William E. Jones’s trilogy of novels set in Los Angeles. The new book begins several years after the end of the second novel. I Should Have Known Better’s former art school students and their companions face decisions about whether they should continue their frivolous adventures or begin to lead more conventional lives. As these bright young things approach middle age―and gentrification swallows up affordable neighborhoods―they find themselves dealing with real life in all its unpleasantness against a background of news about the war in Iraq. Due to stubbornness or inertia, the narrator sticks to his bohemian ways, finding work in the porn industry, while his friends settle down, flourish as artists, leave town, or destroy themselves.\nI Didn’t See It Coming continues the stories of all of the major characters in the trilogy, including Moira, the idealistic leftist who emigrates to Mexico; Bernie, the brilliant but wildly impractical teacher and book collector; Paul, the promiscuous and acidly witty fop; and Winston, the Balkan immigrant who returns to Europe and is catapulted to art stardom. The novel also reveals the fate of Temo, the love of the narrator’s life, who disappears under mysterious circumstances at the conclusion of I Should Have Known Better. I Didn’t See It Coming is a page turner bristling with energy and brimming with the kind of explicit sex scenes that readers have come to expect from the author of I’m Open to Anything and True Homosexual Experiences.

I Didn't See It Coming

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Jones, William E.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Jones, William E.