John Jeremiah Sullivan

One evening late in his life, veteran sportswriter Mike Sullivan was asked by his son what he remembered best from his three decades in the press box.

The forgotten history of a colonial-era Utopia resonates to the present day in this epic of narrative nonfiction in the tradition of David Grann's The Lost City of Z and Rinker Buck's The Oregon Trail In 1735, charismatic German lawyer and accused atheist Christian Gottlieb Priber fled Germany, under threat of arrest, bound for colonial South Carolina. When he arrived, he sold his possessions and hiked 400 miles west, into the woods of what is now Tennessee. There, in the Cherokee village of Grand Tellico, Priber created a utopian society that he named Paradise. For six years, Paradise was governed by a set of revolutionary ideas that included racial equality, sexual freedom, and a lack of private property. Most troublingly for the English, Priber spoke against colonialism itself. Many of his ideas - which he chronicled in a mysterious manuscript he called Paradise -- went on to inform the American and French Revolutions, as well socialist theory. Priber's ideas were so subversive that he was hunted for half a decade and eventually captured by the British - making headlines in London -- and was imprisoned until his death. At that point, the only copy of his book was apparently burned. John Jeremiah Sullivan brings this lost history to vivid life, immersing readers in the world of the colonies, 18th-century Native American life, and Enlightenment-era Europe with a vast body of research and his singular narrative gifts.

t skarpt, men menneskelig blikk på det kulturelle landskapet i USA. Fra det høye til det lave og det laveste av det lave, av den prisvinnende unge stjernen innen fortellende dokumentarlitteratur. I Pulphead tar John Jeremiah Sullivan oss med på en fantastisk reise i den amerikansk populære, upopulære og noen ganger helt bortglemte kulturen. Dette er fortellingene om USA fortalt på en ny måte.

John Jeremiah Sullivan takes us on a funhouse hall-of-mirrors ride through the other side of America - to the Ozarks for a Christian rock festival; Thompson and the wit and insight of Joan Didion, Sullivan - with a laidback, erudite Southern charm that's all his own - shows us how America really (no, really) lives now.

Named A Best Book of 2011 by the New York Times, Time Magazine, the Boston Globe and Entertainment Weekly A sharp-eyed, uniquely humane tour of America's cultural landscape--from high to low to lower than low--by the award-winning young star of the literary nonfiction world. In Pulphead, John Jeremiah Sullivan takes us on an exhilarating tour of our popular, unpopular, and at times completely forgotten culture. Simultaneously channeling the gonzo energy of Hunter S. Thompson and the wit and insight of Joan Didion, Sullivan shows us--with a laidback, erudite Southern charm that's all his own--how we really (no, really) live now. In his native Kentucky, Sullivan introduces us to Constantine Rafinesque, a nineteenth-century polymath genius who concocted a dense, fantastical prehistory of the New World. Back in modern times, Sullivan takes us to the Ozarks for a Christian rock festival; to Florida to meet the alumni and straggling refugees of MTV's Real World, who've generated their own self-perpetuating economy of minor celebrity; and all across the South on the trail of the blues. He takes us to Indiana to investigate the formative years of Michael Jackson and Axl Rose and then to the Gulf Coast in the wake of Katrina--and back again as its residents confront the BP oil spill. Gradually, a unifying narrative emerges, a story about this country that we've never heard told this way. It's like a fun-house hall-of-mirrors tour: Sullivan shows us who we are in ways we've never imagined to be true. Of course we don't know whether to laugh or cry when faced with this reflection--it's our inevitable sob-guffaws that attest to the power of Sullivan's work.

The veteran Harper's writer shares his experiences following Secretariat around the country in 1973, serving up a witty, fact-filled meditation on humankind's relationship to the horse. Reprint. 35,000 first printing.

The first volume of the Gonzo papers brings together a selection of the legendary American journalist's articles, cultural commentary, rants, and essays on subjects ranging from the Super Bowl and Watergate to napalm, Las Vegas, Hemingway, Brando, sharks and drugs. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.