Perv--A Love Story - Softcover

Stahl, Jerry

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0688177875 ISBN 13: 9780688177874

Publisher: William Morrow & Company, 2014

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review:

"A blazing testament . . . Stahl pulls the story togehter with tender, erotic surprises and poignant emotional transformations. . . . A memorably harrowing journey."--" Publishers Weekly

?A gripping and powrful piece of work.?--" Mirabella

?Black comedy at its darkest--funny, poignant, and neurotically absurd . . . a worthwhile trip back into teenage nightmares.?--" Booklist

"Jerry Stahl's work fills the gap in American literature left void since the death of the late, great Terry Southern."-- Jim Carroll, author of "The Basketball Diaries and "Void, Of Course

"This is a beautiful book. There are parts that had me laughing out loud, yet it is a tragic story of extraordinary tenderness. The prose is flawless whether he is relating what is happening at the moment or flowing through space and time, which he does with perfection."-- Hubert Selby Jr., author of "Last Exit to Brooklyn

""Perv--A Love Story is a hysterical trip back to every ugly moment you want to forget about "growing up" and "coming of age." The writing is wicked and delicious, reminiscent of the late, great Terry Southern. Jerry Stahl is truly twisted, truly gifted."-- Legs McNeil, author of"Please Kill Me

?Dig it: "Perv--A Love Story is a beautifully wrought and twisted ode to freaks, beatniks, hopheads, and the wild-assed and strange everywhere. Jerry Stahl is the American hipster bard.?-- James Ellroy, author of "L.A. Confidential and "My Dark Places

?Utterly charming! Surely the most registered evocation of youthful phalli and pudenda since George Eliot's "The Mill on the Floss.?-- Mark Leyner, author of "My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist

?Jerry Stahl's scarified heart is river-deep and mountain-high: a wild-child running marathons in the dark, he holds a torch-song high in the sweetness of his hand.?-- Bruce Wagner, author of "I'm Losing You

"Jerry Stahl writes like the bastard lovechild of Terry Southern and Flannery O'Connor. "Perv--A Love Story is sexy, heartbreaking and painfully funny."-- Rosanna Arquette

?Jerry Stahl is brutally cool! He brings on the end of the peace and love youth optimism the same way Altamont and the Manson murders did. Fast, furious and in your face.?-- Matt Pinfield, MTV veejay

?Jerry Stahl is a dangerous man. His predilection for burrowing deep beneath the blistered pigskin surface of the American mind,his ability to puncture the distended bladder of the American libido, make him the kind of writer who speaks truths other writers wouldn't go near. "Perv is nothing short of pure genius. It lays bare the sick-f*ck underbelly of the peace-and-love era like no novel before it. Hysterical, disturbing, insanely funny, "Perv blows the rest of American fiction out of the water.?-- Mark Mothersbaugh, composer and founder of Devo

?Jerry Stahl's "Perv is Phillip Roth in a head-on collision with Harry Crews. Naked, ugly and funny. Hard to swallow, hard to put down.?-- Eric Bogosian, author of "Suburbia

?It is one thing, fine and rare, to write from the heart. It is another thing, finer and rarer, to write from the secret unutterable chambers of the heart. Jerry Stahl, whose words are as cool and deadly striking as a cottonmouth in the moonless dark night of the soul, does just that. No one who reads him will remain quite the same, for in that dangerous night, amid its horror and wicked laughter, lie the powers of a writer as brave as he is gifted. Jerry Stahl is the real thing.?-- Nick Tosches, author of "Dino and "Hellfire

?"Perv is the "Catcher in the Rye for the New Millennium.?-- Karen Finley, performance artist

"Stahl does it again. . . . "Perv--A Love Story is to adolescent angst what"Permanent Midnight was to drug-addled stupor . . . a biting and hilarious expose which reveals the American Family for what it really is, a horrifying monstrosity whose poisoned tentacles attempt to snuff the life out of you. . . . I laughed so hard I wet the bed."-- Lydia Lunch, performance artist and author of "Paradoxia

"Imagine Holden Caulfield on bad acid. . . . "Perv--A Love Story is the definitive young outsider story, told only as Stahl can tell it."-- Ben Stiller

"Full of really filthy, really great writing. "Perv makes me want to sleep with my great-aunt. I don't know why."-- Peter Farrelly, writer-director of "There's Something About Mary

"Always entertaining, "Perv makes the typical teenage experience seem like an episode of "Little House on the Prairie."--" The Austin Chronicle

"[Stahl's] brilliantly demented riffs beg to be read--or screamed--aloud."--" Entertainment Weekly

"Perv never lets up until its death-rattling, orgasmic climax. If we take one thing away from this exceptional tale, it's that perversity is a norm, a healthy--if unhappy--response to the sickness of modernity."--"Paper

""Perv is a timeless tale of teenage displacement and, weirdly enough, star-gazing wonder."--"Salon

."..a nightmare coming-of-age trip -- imagine the Farrelly Brothers doing 'Easy Rider'."--"Salon

About the Author:

Jerry Stahl is the author of the narcotic memoir Permanent Midnight and Perv--a Love Story, both Los Angeles Times bestsellers, as well as the acclaimed novels Pain Killers, Plainclothes Naked, and I, Fatty. He has written extensively for film and television.

About this edition

• Publisher: William Morrow & Company
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0688177875
• ISBN 13: 9780688177874
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352