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  • Published: 15 August 2012
  • ISBN: 9780099572350
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 416
  • RRP: $35.00

Pulphead

Notes from the Other Side of America




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 world

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; to Florida to meet the straggling refugees of MTV's Real World; 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. Simultaneously channeling the gonzo energy of Hunter S. 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.

  • Published: 15 August 2012
  • ISBN: 9780099572350
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 416
  • RRP: $35.00

About the author

John Jeremiah Sullivan

John Jeremiah Sullivan is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and the southern editor of The Paris Review. He writes for GQ, Harper's Magazine, and Oxford American, and is the author of Blood Horses and Pulphead. Sullivan lives in Wilmington, North Carolina.

Also by John Jeremiah Sullivan

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Praise for Pulphead

Pulphead has a ramshackle loquacity, a down-home hyper-eloquence and an off-the-wallishness that is quite distinct - and highly addictive

Goeff Dyer

The most involving collection of essays to appear in many a year

Harper's Baazar

The best, and most important collection of magazine writing since David Foster Wallace's A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

New York Times Book Review

From prehistoric caves to Axl Rose's oxygen chamber, Sullivan's generous, witty voice lights up every page

Joe Dunthorne

I was totally blown away by this collection of the new new new journalism, or however many "news" we’re up to these days. I think I like it as much – at times, even more – than Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never do Again. And that, for me, is saying a lot

(interview with) Zadie Smith, Foyles website

Pulphead is a big, fat, frequently exhilarating collection

Guardian

The ghost of Mark Twain is evoked in this outstanding collection of essays

Sunday Times

The Southern editor of the Paris Review can write as scintillatingly about the tea party, Michael Jackson or Hurricane Katrina as he can about rare Southern folk blues or American reality television

The Economist

The best non-fiction... whether he’s writing about the southern literary tradition or smoking pot in Disneyland, the man is astute, funny and wonderful company

Nick Laird, Guardian

The essay collection continues to thrive; of the many I came across this year, the best ... [included] Pulphead

Leo Robson, New Statesman

Magnificent ... elegant, engaged and full of feeling... I’ve lost count of the number of people I’ve pressed it on

Olivia Laing, New Statesman

Proof of the power of non-fiction to defamiliarise the ordinary and familiarise the strange... a Cadillac-on-the-freeway tour of Americana

Talitha Stevenson, New Statesman

Pulls off quite a trick ... he mines the residual weirdness and oddities of the "other side of America" without ever condescending to his subjects

Jonathan Derbyshire, New Statesman

Of these essays, I really, really liked the one on Michael Jackson. Sullivan tells us more interesting stuff in this one essay than everything else I’ve read put together - the ancestors who were slaves, the scandals, the voice, the way he composed music; Sullivan tries to understand the way Jackson thought

William Leith, Spectator

Slangy, reported, in the moment... a collection of smart and fizzy magazine pieces

Sam Leith, Prospect

Of these essays I really, really liked the one on Michael Jackson... Sullivan tells us more interesting stuff in this one essay than everything else I’ve read put together... Sullivan tries to understand the way Jackson thought

William Leith, Spectator

Simultaneously folksy, modern, curious, confiding and rigorously intellectual

Tom Cox, Sunday Times