A Review of "The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice the Radical Paper that Changed American Culture" by Tricia Romano

 

What an artfully deejayed book Tricia Romano has spun for us, the (mostly) oral history The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of The Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture (Public Affairs, 2024). This 571-page doorstop of a volume covers the full history of the Voice, from its founding by Dan Wolf, Ed Fancher, and Norman Mailer in 1955 to its demise in 2018. (The Voice rose back to online life in 2021, with occasional print editions, but you know how zombies are.) To tell the fractious tale, Romano — who wrote about New York nightlife for the paper — weaves together more than 200 interviews, digs up archival material from those already gone, and quotes clips from stories capturing landmark events like Stonewall, the AIDs crisis, and the rise of some nepo-baby scumbag real estate developer who was a jerk in 1979 even before the rest of the world got to (unfortunately) know him.

Care to read the rest then do at the Independent's site.

Rooting Interests: A Roger Angell Appreciation

 

I can be assured I’ve been reading Roger Angell for nearly 45 years, as my copy of his Five Seasons, is inscribed 1978 and “Merry Christmas” from family friends. Now the book’s dust cover is ragged and ripped, and when I open it, it seems the pages are about to let loose from their binding. But I had to turn to it again, as Angell passed away May 20 at the astounding age of 101.

I’m not alone in admitting that Angell is no doubt one of the reasons I became a writer—FanGraphs’ Jay Jaffe insightfully titled his moving tribute to him “Your Favorite Baseball Writer’s Favorite Baseball Writer.” But what a wonderful door opening into a writer’s world Angell provided—the elegance of his prose, his adult wit, his gimlet-eyed observational skills. He could regularly attest, in long-form New Yorker journalism collected every five years into books, his abiding love for a game I also adored, but one that awkward and gawky me would never be much good at it, so I needed another way in. Words were that way.

Care to read the rest then do so at The California Review of Books.