Novels
- Coyote Dream (2004)
Novels
- Cut Numbers (1988)
- Trinities (1994)
- Me and the Devil (2012)
Collections
- The Nick Tosches Reader (2000)
Non fiction
- Country (1979)
- Hellfire (1982)
- Hall and Oates (1985)
- Power on Earth (1986)
- Unsung Heroes of Rock ‘n’ Roll (1991)
- Dino (1992)
- The Devil and Sonny Liston (2000)
- Night Train (2000)
- Where Dead Voices Gather (2001)
- The Last Opium Den (2002)
- In the Hand of Dante (2002)
- King of the Jews (2005)
- Save the Last Dance for Satan (2011)
- Under Tiberius (2015)
Novels Book Covers
Book Covers
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Jessica Davis Stein Books Overview
Cut Numbers
This Mafia thriller is familiar with the darkest chambers of the human heart, with a wildly elastic prose style. It unravels the Mafia that only insiders know the messy day to day business of violent crime, po*rnography, gambling, and extortion.
Trinities
It is the final battle between America’s last generation of Sicilian Mafiosi and the world’s most ruthless Asian druglords. The prize is a $10 million hero*in market. Caught in the middle is Johnny Di Pietro, a wiseguy who embarks on a journey that will take him from Brooklyn and Chinatown to the backrooms of Italy and the Orient and into the heart of evil. HC: Doubleday.
The Nick Tosches Reader
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.
Country
Celebrating the dark origins of our most American music, Country reveals a wild shadowland of history that encompas*ses 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.
Hellfire
The life of Jerry Lee Lewis is one of the most dramatic and tormented in rock ‘n’ roll history. Hellfire is a wild, riveting, and beautifully written biography that received universal acclaim on its original publication and remains one of the most remarkable biographies ever written. Born in Louisiana to a family legacy of great courage and greater wildness, Jerry Lee was torn throughout his life between a demanding Pentecostal God and the Devil of alcohol, drugs, and the boogie woogie piano. At fourteen he began performing publicly, and at twenty two he recorded ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On’, which propelled him to stardom. But almost immediately, news of his marriage to his thirteen year old cousin nearly destroyed his career. Over the next twenty years, Jerry Lee would rise again as a country star, and lose it all to his addictions to alcohol, drugs, and his own fame. Hellfire is an audacious, artful look directly into the soul of a rock ‘n’ roll legend.
Unsung Heroes of Rock ‘n’ Roll
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.
Dino
A biography of Jerry Lewis’s other half discusses Martin’s Ohio childhood, his rise to the heights of fame as a singer, his uneasy partnership with Lewis and the Rat Pack, and more.
The Devil and Sonny Liston
The anti Ali, Sonny Liston represents everything that is compelling and terrifying about boxing. An overwhelmingly powerful fighter, Liston rose from a desperately poor childhood to street criminal to world heavyweight champion. He then became the pawn of a series of criminal organizations and was shadowed throughout his life by government investigations, arrests, and the rumor of corruption. The Devil and Sonny Liston is not just the biography of a boxer; it is one of the greatest organized crime stories ever told and confirms Toschess place as one of the most powerful and original writers of our time. Toschess acclaimed biography of Dean Martin, Dino, sold more than 110,000 copies From the rappers Wu Tang Clan to writer Thom Jones, people are fascinated by Sonny Liston and by boxing in general. King of the World by David Remnick sold more than 100,000 copies. Tom Cruises Cruise/Wagner Productions is at work on a movie based on this book. A collection of Toschess best writing, The Nick Tosches Reader, is due out in 2000. Tosches is a contributing editor of Vanity Fair.
Where Dead Voices Gather
Nick Tosches spent 20 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 Millers life, his legacy, and the world of American popular music. Long celebrated as one of Americas leading writers on music and popular culture, Nick Tosches is increasingly recognized as one of the most original writers at work in America today. In the tradition of Nicholas Dawidoffs bestselling The Catcher Was a Spy and Peter Guralnicks hugely successful Searching for Robert Johnson, Toschess Where Dead Voices Gather brings a little known figure into our collective consciousness.
In the Hand of Dante
Deep inside the Vatican library, a priest discovers the rarest and most valuable art object ever found: the manuscript of ‘The Divine Comedy,’ written in Dante’s own hand. Via Sicily, the manuscript makes its way from the priest to a mob boss in New York City, where a writer named Nick Tosches is called to authenticate the prize. For this writer, the temptation is too great: he steals the manuscript in a last chance bid to have it all. As this dark and twisted journey unfolds, so too does a parallel tale: the odyssey of Dante himself, a man trying to weave a poem that contains the sum of the world’s wisdom and the very breath of the divine. This novel combines Tosches’ vast scholarship about ‘The Divine Comedy,’ Dante Alighieri, and the Middle Ages with an equally vast and intimate knowledge of the lowest murdering scum of New York’s ugliest streets. In the Hand of Dante is a work of astounding audacity and beauty, the masterwork that Nick Tosches has been building toward for years. Some will find it offensive; others will declare it transcendent; it is certain to be the most ragingly debated novel of the decade.
King of the Jews
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.
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