From legendary cult writer Jerry Stahl comes Plainclothes Naked, a breakout novel that jacks up crime fiction to new heights of twisted, sexy, mind-blowing brilliance.
With searing wit and devastating detail, Stahl -- whose work, Jim Carroll has written, "fills the gap in American literature left void since the death of the late, great Terry Southern " -- takes us deep into the minds of addicts and detectives, fetishists and killers. It's a vision of American misfits in a world of violent crime, official corruption, drug-addled scheming, and -- perhaps strangest of all -- genuine, up-from-the-toes true love.
In a wildly careening plot that can only be described as crack noir, two pipe-heads accidentally steal a photo of George W. Bush's presidential package with a happy face tattooed on it and decide to blackmail the Republican Party. Before the crack-crazed thieves can follow through, however, a gorgeous, whip-smart young nurse absconds with the goods. But Nurse Tina's got her own problems -- she's just offed her online "money swami" husband with a bowl of Drano-laced Lucky Charms. When Manny Rubert, a scarred ex-junkie turned codeine-popping detective, is called in to investigate the "foamer" hubby's untimely demise, love hits him like a wrench to the head. Soon Manny and Tina are making plans of their own for the presidential pic -- and for their future together. But the meddling police chiefs and motel room sex-change surgeons of the world just won't leave them alone. And then there are those killer crackheads, still out there and closing in...
At once a scathing tale of contemporary insanity and a no-holds-barred, tour de force thriller, Plainclothes Naked forges violence and comedy into a criminal love story as shocking as it is transcendent.

Plainclothes Naked

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Stahl, Jerry

Mystery

William Morrow

“Often brilliant, always compelling.” — Pittsburgh Tribune 
From acclaimed and controversial author Jerry Stahl comes one of the most vividly subversive, savagely funny, explosive novels yet unleashed in our tender century. Pain Killers is a violent and mind-wrenching masterpiece in the Gonzo Noir style that has earned Jerry Stahl his legion of avid fans. For those who enjoy the works of Chuck Palahniuk, Terry Southern, and Hunter S Thompson—as well as Stahl’s own Permanent Midnight, I Fatty, Perv–A Love Story, and Plainclothes Naked—Pain Killers is sure to please.

Pain Killers: A Novel

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

Down-and-out ex-cop and not-quite-reformed addict Manny Rupert accepts an undercover job to find out if a California prison inmate is who he claims to be: Josef Mengele, aka the Angel of Death. Did the sadistic legend, whose Auschwitz crimes still horrify, fake his own death thirty years ago? Suddenly Manny finds himself in the middle of a conspiracy involving genocide, drugs, eugenics, human experiments, and America's secret history of collusion with the Nazisall while careening from one extreme of apocalypse-adjacent reality to the other. Not for the faint of heart, Jerry Stahl's Pain Killers hurtles readers into a disturbing, original, and alarmingly real world filled with some of the strangest sex, most horrific violence, and screaming wit ever found on the page.

William Morrow Paperbacks

In a wildly careening plot that can only be described as crack noir, two pipeheads accidentally steal a photo of George W. Bush's presidential package and decide to blackmail the Republican Party. Before the crack-crazed thieves can follow through, however, gorgeous, whip-smart Nurse Tina, who's just offed her husband with a bowl of Drano-laced Lucky Charms, absconds with the goods. When Manny Rubert, a scarred ex-junkie turned codeine-popping detective, is called in to investigate the "foamer" hubby's untimely demise, love hits him like a wrench to the head. Soon Manny and Tina are making plans of their own for the presidential pie - and for their future together. But the meddling police chiefs and motel room sex-change surgeons of the world just won't leave them alone. And then there are those killer crackheads, still out there and closing in. . . .

Lloyd has a particular set of skills. He writes the small print for prescription drugs, marital aids, and incontinence products. The clients present him with a list of possible side effects. His job is "to recite and minimize"—sometimes by just saying them really fast and other times by finding the language that can render them acceptable. The results are ingenious. The methods diabolical.
Lloyd has a habit, too. He cops smack during coffee breaks at his new job writing copy for Christian Swingles, an online dating service for the faithful. He finds a precarious balance between hackwork and heroin until he encounters Nora, a mysterious and troubled young woman, a Sylvia Plath with tattoos and implants, who asks for his help.
Lloyd falls swiftly in love, but Nora bestows her affections at a cost. Before Lloyd clears his head from the fog of romance, he finds himself complicit in Nora's grand scheme to horrify the world and exact revenge on those who poison the populace in order to sell them the cure.

Happy Mutant Baby Pills: A Novel

Permanent Midnight: A Memoir

Permanent Midnight is not just the story of how success destroyed Jerry Stahl, but how Stahl destroyed his own success. Starting life as the prototypical "middle-class kid," he endured his father's early death, his mother's descent into major depression, and life on his own from the age of sixteen. In spite of his own bad habits, he penetrated the far-flung, sometimes exotic worlds of magazines, movies, pornography, and television. His byline appeared everywhere from Esquire and Playboy to L.A. Style, Hustler, and The Village Voice, while he penned scripts for twisted cult film classics like Cafe Flesh and Dr. Caligari. Eventually, he ended up in the big-buck world of network television, banging out shows for mega-hits like Moonlighting, ALF, and thirtysomething. But even when he was making five grand a week, he was shooting six. Beneath the successful front ran a toxic undercurrent of betrayal and madness, hard narcotics and hardcore sex. Permanent Midnight captures the crazed reality of this double and triple life. Careening daily from his luxury home to L.A.'s most hellacious neighborhoods, from the rankest methadone clinic to the backlot at Twentieth Century-Fox, he financed a heroin habit that brought on the soothing hiss of oblivion, even as it stole his health and trashed his career. Until, in a private apocalypse straight out of Day of the Locusts, Jerry Stahl kicked smack and emerged clean.

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

GRAND CENTRAL PUB.

The author recounts his battle with heroin addiction while he was a Hollywood writer for "Moonlighting" and other hit television shows, and his successful fight to beat his addiction and fulfill his role as husband and father

Grand Central Publishing

The author recounts his battle with heroin addiction while he was a successful Hollywood writer for "Moonlighting" and other hit television shows, and his successful fight to beat his addiction and fulfill his role as husband and father

WARNER BOOKS

Set in 1970 -- the last, dark days of hippiedom, when everyone was high -- Perv is the story of Bobby Stark, a sixteen-year-old bundle of angst and hormones who loses his virginity in a drug-addled tryst with a one-armed barber's daughter. His best friend, Tennie Toad, rats him out, and Bobby gets kicked out of prep school and shipped to Pittsburgh to live with his mom, a sozzled electroshock aficionado who still can't get over the insult of Bobby's father's suicide-by-streetcar. After myriad weird encounters with his mother's "dates," Bobby flees the horrors of Mom's condo and hooks up with Michelle, the girl of his dreams, a lapsed Hare Krishna-ette he's known since kindergarten. The couple decides, in the spirit of the times, to hitch to San Francisco. But before they make mile one, they're picked up by a pair of Bad Hippies -- Meat and Varnish -- spiritual cousins to Charles Manson. The adventure gets harrowing, as the duo narrowly escape rape, vanquish their assailants, and stagger from Meat's hell-fueled Lincoln Continental transformed, traumatized, and ready, of all things, to fall in love.
 Set in 1970 -- the last, dark days of hippiedom, when everyone was high--Perv is the story of Bobby Stark, a sixteen-year-old bundle of angst and hormones who loses his virginity in a drug-addled tryst with a one-armed barber's daughter. His best friend, Tennie Toad, rats him out, and Bobby gets kicked out of prep school and shipped to Pittsburgh to live with his mom, a sozzled electroshock aficionado who still can't get over the insult of Bobby's father's suicide-by-streetcar. After myriad weird encounters with his mother's "dates," Bobby flees the horrors of Mom's condo and hooks up with Michelle, the girl of his dreams, a lapsed Hare Krishna-ette he's known since kindergarten. The couple decides, in the spirit of the times, to hitch to San Francisco. But before they make mile one, they're picked up by a pair of Bad Hippies -- Meat and Varnish -- spiritual cousins to Charles Manson. The adventure gets harrowing, as the duo narrowly escape rape, vanquish their assailants, and stagger from Meat's hell-fueled Lincoln Continental transformed, traumatized, and ready, of all things, to fall in love. Set in 1970--the last, dark days of hippiedom, when everyone was high--Perv is the story of Bobby Stark, a sixteen-year-old bundle of angst and hormones who loses his virginity in a drug-addled tryst with a one-armed barber's daughter. His best friend, Tennie Toad, rats him out, and Bobby gets kicked out of prep school and shipped to Pittsburgh to live with his mom, a sozzled electroshock aficionado who still can't get over the insult of Bobby's father's suicide-by-streetcar. After myriad weird encounters with his mother's "dates," Bobby flees the horrors of Mom's condo and hooks up with Michelle, the girl of his dreams, a lapsed Hare Krishna-ette he's known since kindergarten. The couple decides, in the spirit of the times, to hitch to San Francisco. But before they make mile one, they're picked up by a pair of Bad Hippies--Meat and Varnish--spiritual cousins to Charles Manson. The adventure gets harrowing, as the duo narrowly escape rape, vanquish their assailants, and stagger from Meat's hell-fueled Lincoln Continental transformed, traumatized, and ready, of all things, to fall in love.

Perv--a Love Story

Literature & Fiction

United States

Set in 1970, in the last, dark days of hippiedom, Perv -- A Love Story is the saga of Bobby Stark, a sixteen-year-old batch of desire and angst struggling to stay sane in a world gone Day-Glo.
As the novel opens, Bobby loses his virginity in a drug-addled tryst with a one-armed barber's daughter. For his sins he's thrown out of school and dispatched to live with his mom, a festive electro shock aficionado, whose condo he flees to track down Michelle, the gorgeously damaged, lasped Hare Krishna-ette he's adored since kindergarten.
Like the rest of their generation, the couple hit the road for California, only to be picked up in a hell-fueled Lincoln by a pair of Bad Hippies -- Meat and Varnish -- smacked-out spiritual cousins to Charles Manson. From here the trip gets vicious....
Already an underground classic, Perv-A Love Story is relentlessly twisted, sexy, and savagely funny literary excursion, a novel of doomed youth in the era when Flower Power had begun to wilt.

Dramas & Plays

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

Books by Stahl, Jerry

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

Plainclothes Naked

Pain Killers: A Novel

Pain Killers: A Novel

Plainclothes Naked

Happy Mutant Baby Pills: A Novel

Permanent Midnight: A Memoir

Permanent Midnight: A Memoir

Permanent Midnight: A Memoir

Perv--a Love Story

Perv--a Love Story