The Lonely Hedonist: True Stories of Sex, Drugs, Dinosaurs and Peter Dinklage

Best-selling author Mike Sager has been called “the Beat poet of American journalism, that rare reporter who can make literature out of shabby reality.” The Lonely Hedonist: True Stories of Sex, Drugs, Dinosaurs and Peter Dinklage is Sager’s sixth collection of true stories—sixteen intimate profiles of larger-than-life Americans, both famous and obscure:

The founder of a Beverly Hills sex club who has everything he ever wanted but misses his old life. The most amazing dinosaur fossil ever found—and never seen by the public. The forgotten sixth founding member of the seminal rap group N.W.A. The whirlwind lifestyle of California’s busiest marijuana physician. The Most Interesting Man in the World, in retirement. The former marketing man who is living off the grid on a small plot in suburbia. The secret life of a clown—what happens when the people you’re trying to please begin hating you?

Plus, Game of Thrones' Peter Dinklage, Hollywood genius J.J. Abrams, TV pitchman Ron Popeil (Operators are standing by!), the male supermodel who spent twenty years as a member of a cult, the tiny island in the Pacific where dominating football players are made and exported in astounding numbers, and the secret community of underground hash oil makers known as Wooks.

“Mike Sager writes about places and events we seldom get a look at,” said Pulitzer Prize–winning author Richard Ben Cramer. “But with Sager in command of all the telling details, he shows us history, humanity, humor, sometimes even honor. He makes us glad to live with our eyes wide open.”

“For four decades, Mike Sager has been one of our finest practitioners of feature magazine writing, picking up where the New Journalism Gods—Wolfe, Talese,Thompson, et al—left off. This latest trove of Sager’s irresistible brand of social anthropology shows him in peak form, whether writing about celebrities, like J.J. Abrams and Peter Dinklage, or the usual gathering of bonafide American originals that find their way into his stories–a family-owned sex toys factory, a family farm, a weed doctor, a clown, a man who started a sex club in Beverly Hills, and more.”

–Alex Belth, Editor, EsquireClassic.com

“Filled with unforgettable personalities and muscular sentences that mean business, Sager’s incredible stories of celebrities, dreamers and capitalists take readers through the warped frontier of new American excess and commerce, and they locate the pain and beauty in the dark circles under America’s eyes. Thankfully, Sager has a great sense of humor.”

–Aaron Gilbreath, editor, Longreads.com, author, Everything We Don’t Know

“I have been a fan of Sager’s work roughly since I learned to read. Whether he’s profiling the actor Peter Dinklage, a professional clown, or almond farmers in California’s Central Valley, Sager gives you a peek into his subject’s soul. How he does it remains a mystery.”

–Elon Green, contributor, Harvard University’s Neiman Storyboard, The New Yorker