Review“I started reading The Magic Christian and I thought I was going to go insane . . . It was an incredible influence on me.” —Hunter S. Thompson“[The Magic Christian] is at once the most profoundly satiric and wildly comic account of our life and times in years.” —Nelson Algren“Terry Southern is the most profoundly witty writer of our generation, and in The Magic Christian he surpasses Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet, a work similarly inspired by conventional wisdom’s serene idiocy.” —Gore Vidal“Terry Southern is the illegitimate son of Mack Sennet and Edna Saint Vincent Millay.” —Kurt Vonnegut“Terry Southern was one of the first and best of the new wave of American writers, defining the cutting edge of black comedy.” —Joseph HellerProduct DescriptionIn this uproarious and wicked cult-classic, Southern skewers American greed and pomposityGuy Grand, an eccentric billionaire prankster, is rich enough to do whatever he likes. And what he likes is to carefully execute projects where he can cauterize by ridicule what the rest of the world ignores: complacency, greed, corruption, and idiocy. Determined to “make it hot for people,” Grand spends his billions staging a series of hilarious, sometimes bewildering stunts, lampooning along the way the American holy cows of money, status, power, beauty, media, and stardom. Concocting deliciously perverse mayhem, he throws a million one-hundred-dollar bills into an enormous vat of steaming offal, proving just what people will do for money, and he promotes a new silky shampoo that turns hair to wire and a deodorant that becomes a time-released stench-bomb. He inserts subliminally suggestive and perverse images into well-loved classic films, takes a howitzer on safari, and brings a panther to a kennel club dog show. His most elaborate adventure is an ultra-exclusive cruise aboard the S.S. Magic Christian, where elite passengers are treated to a series of madcap indignities.The Magic Christian is a hilarious and savagely satiric view of American commercialism, rich in Southern’s deft handling of detail, dialogue, and delightful deviancy.This ebook features an illustrated biography of Terry Southern including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s estate.

Acclaimed novelist, Beat godfather, prolific screenwriter, and one of the founders of New Journalism, as well as the only guy to wear shades on the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's cover, Terry Southern was an audacious original. Now Dig This is a journey through Terry Southern's America, from the buttoned-down '50s through the sexual revolution, rock 'n' roll, and independent cinema (which he helped inaugurate by cowriting and producing Easy Rider), up to his death in 1995. It spans Southern's stellar career, from early short stories and a Paris Review interview with Henry Green, to his legendary Esquire piece covering the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention with Jean Genet and William Burroughs and his equally infamous account of life neck-high in girls and cocaine aboard The Rolling Stones' tour jet, to his memories of twentieth-century legends like Abbie Hoffman, Kurt Vonnegut, and Stanley Kubrick, with whom he wrote Dr. Strangelove. "A voice electric with street rhythm and royal with offhand intellection ... stuffed with strange and silken scraps." -- Troy Patterson, Entertainment Weekly "The subterranean Texan's finest moments are exquisite reads ... like a hot poker in the eye of conventional narrative." -- A. D. Amorosi, Philadelphia City Paper "The range of writing ... [was] as lethal as Mailer claimed and still awaiting the attention it deserves." -- Charles Taylor, Newsday "... reveals a writer defined by his generosity, by the pursuit of fun and by an insatiable ... literary appetite...." -- Claire Dederer, The New York Times Book ReviewFrom Publishers WeeklyWith this outstanding, volatile m‚lange of short pieces, Nile Southern repositions his father "the conduit between the Beatles and the Beats" as a Class Four hurricane in the Hipster Pantheon. Labeled "the Mt. Rushmore of modern American humor" by Saturday Night Live head writer Michael O'Donoghue (who hired him), Southern (1924-1995) is best remembered for his Oscar-nominated screenplays (Easy Rider; Dr. Strangelove) and novels (Candy; The Magic Christian). He also unleashed assorted anarchic articles, reviews (in the Nation), short stories and photo captions (Virgin: A History of Virgin Records, his last book). The opening interview from 1986 is followed by four stories that animate characters via expressive, askew vernacular. Letters to Lenny Bruce and George Plimpton, plus a hilarious commentary on female orgasms mailed to Ms. in 1972, are included. The famed pie-throwing sequence deleted by Kubrick from Dr. Strangelove is described in detail in "Strangelove Outtake: Notes from the War Room." Southern's sharp Esquire piece on the 1968 Chicago police attacks on protesters remains potent. Affectionate portraits of pranksters, poets and friends Plimpton, Maurice Girodias, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Abbie Hoffman, Vonnegut, Frank O'Hara make the closing pages sparkle. Readers will be grateful to Nile Southern for unearthing Terry's "unclassifiable schools of literary invention" from mini-storage for this variegated, entertaining book. (June 1)Forecast: Psychedelic cover art angles full-tilt towards the target audience. Arriving four months after Lee Hill's biography of Southern (HarperCollins), this is promoted at www.terrysouthern.com, a site that suggests there is more material forthcoming.Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.From Library JournalSouthern is probably best known for his screenplays, which include Dr. Strangelove, Easy Rider, and Barbarella, and for Candy (1958), the erotic novel he coauthored with Mason Hoffenberg for the Olympia Press. Overseen by his son Nile, this posthumously published collection contains interviews, stories, letters, and memoirs, some of which appear here for the first time. Among the more interesting pieces are those that deal with filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, including a proposed scene for the movie that would become Eyes Wide Shut. There are memorable portraits of contemporaries such as William Burroughs, Frank O'Hara, and Larry Rivers and reminiscences of the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention, which he covered for Esquire alongside Burroughs and Jean Genet. As in most collections of this kind, the quality of the writing is sometimes uneven, but Southern's irreverent wit and outrageous humor usually make for lively reading. Recommended for contemporary literature and film collections. William Gargan, Brooklyn Coll. Lib., CUNY Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review“Southern has managed to lay a kind of prose on us that can perpetrate a complete hoax while telling a mother’s own truth.” —Chicago Tribune “If there were a Mount Rushmore of American humor, Terry Southern would be the mountain they’d carve it from.” —Michael O’Donoghue, SNL“Terry Southern is the illegitimate son of Mack Sennet and Edna Saint Vincent Millay.” —Kurt Vonnegut“Terry Southern is the only author capable of handling mayhem on a gigantic scale.” —Esquire“Terry Southern writes a mean coolly deliberate, and murderous prose—and in it we may have at last found the rightful heir (saints protect me from sacrilege) of Nathaniel West.” —Norman MailerProduct DescriptionA darkly hilarious, wildly erotic satire of HollywoodKing B., the world’s most admired filmmaker—winner of a string of Oscars and awards from Cannes to Venice—takes on a new project: the most expensive, star-studded, high-quality, X-rated film ever made. He joins forces with producer Sid Krassman, who’s made a fortune with B movies, and Angela Sterling, a misunderstood sex symbol who longs to do “serious” work. After convincing the principality of Liechtenstein to host the production in exchange for a distribution exclusive to boost tourism, King B. and Krassman arrive with cast and crew to make The Faces of Love. While keeping the nature of the film secret from American bankers, King B. lines up a host of European and American big-name stars. But word leaks out to the local religious groups and possibly even the Vatican. Between the Cardinal’s attempts to sabotage production and the big egos and even bigger libidos behind the scenes, the enterprise plummets into hilarious anarchy.Blue Movie is comic eroticism at its best—populated by over-the-top characters, memorable dialogue, and perverse vignettes, and colored by razor-sharp insights into the film industry.This ebook features an illustrated biography of Terry Southern including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s estate.

Review“Mr. Southern has given us a dazzling performance. This is the book of the year.”—Henry Green, The Observer“A technical masterpiece . . . both maddeningly elliptical and startlingly explicit.”—The Times "A mad, deft book, subject to the rules of poetry.” —BBC Radio“Flash and Filigree is a very mysterious creation. Black humor? More than that, much more . . . Terry Southern knows how to write!” —William Burroughs“Flash and Filigree has an unfailing sense of the ridiculous, heightened by deadpan delivery.” —Time “The airless, slightly torpid climate of suburban Los Angeles and the speech of its natives is rendered with arresting vividness. Equally compelling are his bizarre protagonists. —The New York Times“Written in dancing prose, Flash and Filigree is startlingly original.” —Detroit Sunday TimesProduct DescriptionA satirical dream-logic journey through the dark heart of 1950s Los AngelesDr. Frederick Eichner, world-renowned dermatologist, is visited by the entrancingly irritating Felix Treevly who comes to him as a patient and stays as an obsession. Prosaic incidents blossom into bizarre developments with the sharpened reality of dreams as the spectral Mr. Treevly leads the doctor into a series of increasingly weird situations. With the assistance of a drunken private detective, a mad judge, a car crash, a game show called “What’s My Disease,” and a hashish party, Treevly drives Eichner to madness and mayhem. It is through comedy and a strange blend of violence and poetic delicacy that the novel charms. Southern’s first novel, Flash and Filigree was turned down by seventeen timorous American publishers. It was Southern’s mentor, the “genius” English novelist Henry Green, who brought the book to the attention of a leading British publishing house, which released it to high praise. A fast-paced dark comedy, Flash and Filigree established Terry Southern as one of the finest American prose stylists to emerge in Paris after the War.This ebook features an illustrated biography of Terry Southern including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s estate.

From Publishers WeeklySouthern's modest, sensitive coming-of-age novel evokes Texas red-dirt country in the 1950s, when nitwits shoot deer or house cats for fun and a "damn nigger" is not worth anything. White 12-year-old Harold Stevens hunts, fishes, smokes pot and has adventures with black C.K., his father's hired hand. Trying hard to act grown-up, Harold assumes he's mentally superior to C.K., who's at least twice his age. Sly, clever C.K., who speaks a rich black idiom, is nobody's fool and the book's real hero, enduring the loutish whitefolk. When C.K.'s murderous convict brother, "Big Nail" Emmett, escapes from a prison farm, the stage is set for a tragedy that will presumably mark Harold forever. Screenwriter and novelist Southern ( Flash and Filigree ) faithfully records a time and a place, but the overall effect is rather slight. Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Kirkus ReviewsA lazy valedictory to Harold Stevens's 13th summer in backwoods Texas, by the author of Candy and The Magic Christian. Together with his family's black hired hand, C. K. Crow, Harold shoots birds and angles for a legendary catfish; he buys his first bullcalf and finds a cow enjoying her first snort of red-dirt marijuana (a double-barreled discovery for him and C. K., who have plans of their own for the locoweed); he recalls his first treehouse, his first taste of deer blood, and the winter that froze the chickens on their roosts; he hells around with his friend Big Lawrence, who likes to kill things and play chicken with freight trains; he looks up his cousin Caddy's dress--with her full cooperation, it turns out; and he and Big Lawrence visit a circus sideshow, carry off the Monkey Man, and take him out for a beer. Meanwhile, C. K.'s homicidal brother Big Nail escapes from a chain gang and makes a beeline for Harold's neighboring town, where a crapshoot between the brothers will erupt in a long-awaited violent climax that doesn't quite pull this rambling, attractive tale together. Despite echoes of Go Down, Moses and the Nick Adams stories, Southern is no Faulkner or Hemingway; Harold is never more than the sum of his adventures. But this coming-of-age valentine to the 50's Texas landscape has an understated, flat-spoken charm of its own. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Review“A remarkable collection. Red-Dirt Marijuana firmly establishes Southern as one of America’s foremost writers.” —George Plimpton“[Red-Dirt Marijuana] contains most of the great short stories in English that are not by Mr. Hemingway or Mr. O’Hara.” —Robert Anton Wilson“A witty and profound collection.” —William S. Burroughs“Terry Southern was one of the first and best of the new wave of American writers, defining the cutting edge of black comedy.”—Joseph Heller“Southern has managed to lay a kind of prose on us that can perpetrate a complete hoax while telling a mother’s own truth.” —Chicago Tribune“Terry Southern is the most profoundly witty writer of our generation.” – Gore VidalProduct DescriptionAn underground classic, Red-Dirt Marijuana is a brilliant collection of incisive, darkly comic, devastating stories and wide-ranging pieces by America’s master satiristOne of the great collections, the range found here is impressive: from new journalism to absurd parodies and theatrical sketches; from absurd short riffs to Southern’s most classic and lyrical early works of fiction. “Red-Dirt Marijuana,” the insightful, funny, and moving story of the relationship between a white boy and a black man, is paired with the horrific knock-down, drag-out of “Razor Fight.” One of the most scandalous stories ever published, “The Blood of a Wig,” combines an insider’s look at the “Quality Lit” biz, the drug underground of Greenwich Village, and a vision of necrophilia involving one of America’s most sacred cows. There is an imaginary encounter between Freud and Kafka in “Apartment to Exchange,” a skewering of the liberal white man and his efforts to befriend a black jazz musician in “You’re Too Hip, Baby,” an exploration of race relations, moonshine, and the baton-twirling subculture in the personal essay “Twirling at Ole Miss” (identified by Tom Wolfe as the first instance of “New Journalism”), and many more pieces with Southern’s signature dark satire, unconventional storylines, and pitch-perfect dialogue.Red-Dirt Marijuana and Other Tastes is a wild, funny, and dazzlingly diverse trip through the American culture of the 1950s and 1960s.This ebook features an illustrated biography of Terry Southern including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s estate.

Review“Sex in America, after [_Candy_], will never be the same.” —_Life_“_Candy_ proved that even a satire on sex could be sexy.” —_Playboy_“Wickedly funny to read and morally bracing as only good satire can be.” —William Styron“Terry Southern is the most profoundly witty writer of our generation.” —Gore VidalProduct DescriptionThe sensational bestseller—a parody of Voltaire’s satire Candide—about the sexy naïf who only wants to truly give of herself Candy, that perfect, adorable, innocent girl, was born on Valentine’s Day, and her Daddy says that’s why she’s so beautiful. At her College in Racine, Wisconsin, in Professor Mephisto’s lecture on philosophy and how “deep and aching are the needs of man,” Candy seems to take his pronouncement to heart, dedicating the rest of her days to, as Southern puts it, “bringing the sweet balm of her warmth to all those lonely men on her arduous path to spiritual enlightenment.” There is the hunchback who causes her to cry out in wild abandon, “Your hump! Give me your hump!”, the crazed gynecologist in the bar bathroom who “examines” her, the salacious aunt, her father’s lecherous twin brother, and the nutty Cracker Foundation, where her guru initiates her into the mystical realm of “glandular mastery.” It is in Tibet, during an earthquake, that a holy man and the Buddha together lead her to full . . . enlightenment. Originally published under a pseudonym, this book had the unique honor of being banned in France, only to become one of the bestselling novels of 1960s America—one that brought Southern both fame and infamy. A book that, along with Lolita, broke the grip of American literary censorship, Candy leaves you tantalized, scandalized, and weak with laughter.This ebook features an illustrated biography of Terry Southern including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s estate.