Next Wave: University Edition: America's New Generation of Great Literary Journalists

Literature & Fiction

Literary

Sager Group LLC

Bestselling author Mike Sager's fourth collection showcases his deftly-written journalism at its best and most mature, a riveting marriage of crime reportage and you-are-there literary anthropology. The book's centerpiece examines the rise and fall of football RoboQuarterback Todd Marinovich--a previously unpublished, thirty-plus thousand word "nonvella" version of his ASME-award winning Esquire story, the inspiration for ESPN's acclaimed documentary, The Marinovich Project. Other true stories include up-close visits with super-celebrity Paris Hilton, South Asian Republican hopeful Gov. Piyush "Bobby" Jindal, Ultimate Fighting Championship impresario Dana White, and coaching phenom Pete Carroll. Plus: A man who spent twenty-nine years in prison for a crime he did not commit. A Muslim immigrant who worked to save the life of the white supremacist who tried to kill him. The best-dressed man in America. An ugly guy in a town that worships beauty. A farm in the mountains where wounded marine veterans are taking care of their own. And "The Porn Identity," where a divorced dad takes to the road to find former starlets and to rediscover his mojo. "Mike Sager writes with uncommon grace and, always, with respect for those who give him their time. His stories cut to the bone of our common humanity." -Paul Hendrickson, author of Seminary and Hemingway's Boat, on The Someone You're Not

The Someone You're Not--University Edition: True Stories of Sports, Celebrity, Politics & Pornography

Mike Sager

Mace Bugen might have been an achondroplastic dwarf--forty-three inches tall with an average-sized head and a torso set on small, twisted legs--but that didn't mean he was an idiot or a pushover. In truth, he was smarter than most; over the years, he learned to effectively turn what society in those days called a handicap into a powerful tool he could use to his advantage. This book features the best of his photos and a biography of his life. At a time before cell phones or Andy Warhol, you could say that Bugen was the world's first practitioner of the celebrity selfie. Or maybe you could say more accurately that he was the world's first selfie photobomber. Over a period of three decades, using his unique combination of guile, cunning, handicap, and sense of entitlement, Mace engineered photos of himself with some of the biggest celebrities of his day, among them Muhammad Ali, Jonas Salk, Jane Russell, Sammy Davis Jr, Joe DiMaggio, and Richard Nixon. In a column dated September 28, 1955, Walter Winchell, the iconic and fedora wearing syndicated gossip columnist, included this item in his roundup: "The dwarf who crashes the gate at most major sports events (past the cops and attendants) is 'Mace' Bugen, an insurance and realty man of Phillipsburg, N.J." Thereafter he was known wherever he went as The Little Gate-Crasher. "When I was a kid," Mace Bugen once said, "I'd ask myself, 'Why is that guy on the football team? Why can't I be on the team? Why didn't God give me the height so I could be the hero?'
"Then at some point I figured it out: I gotta do something special to let 'em know I'm me."

The Little Gate-Crasher: Festival Edition: The Life and Photos of Mace Bugen

Arts & Photography

Kaplan-Mayer, Gabrielle

Photography & Video

"John Holmes was every man's gigolo, a polyester smoothie with a sparse mustache, a flying collar and lots of buttons undone. He wasn't threatening. He chewed gum and overacted. He took a lounge singer's approach to sex, deliberately gentle, ostentatiously artful, a homely guy with a pinkie ring and a big dick who was convinced he was every woman's dream."--excerpt from "The Devil and John Holmes" John Curtis Holmes had the longest, most prolific career in the history of pornography. He had sex on-screen with two generations of leading ladies, from Seka and Marilyn Chambers to Traci Lords, Ginger Lynn, and Italian Member of Parliament Ciccolina. The first man to win the X-Rated Critics Organization Best Actor Award, Holmes was an idol and an icon, the most visible male porn star of his time. Holmes started in the business around 1968 and made more than two thousand movies. But after descending into a world of drugs and crime, he became the central figure in one of the most publicized mass murders in L.A. history, the 1981 Wonderland Avenue killings in Laurel Canyon, in which four people were brutally bludgeoned to death. Holmes was tried and acquitted of the crimes in 1982. He died from complications of AIDS on March 13, 1988.

The Devil and John Holmes: And Other True Stories of Drugs, Porn and Murder

Politics & Social Sciences

Sager, Mike

Social Sciences

A Boy and His Dog in Hell: And Other True Stories

Mike Sager has made a career "finding the quotidian within the extreme, the tender amid the grotesque," according to author and popular Columbia Journalism School professor Sam Freedman. A Boy and His Dog in Hell collects 19 stories that Sager-a best-selling author and veteran of the Washington Post, Rolling Stone, and Esquire-calls "my milestones, the pieces that have defined and distinguished my work over forty-some years of journalism-adventures, high jinks, near-death moments, and wrenching intimate encounters that have helped to shape me as a writer and as a man." With Sager on point, the reader is taken on a journey through an America few people ever see, safe as they are within the borders of their own colorful squares in the patchwork quilt of diverse cultures, communities, and circumstances that make our nation. We meet: A pair of middle-school-age dropouts, brothers, living in the ruins of Northern Philadelphia, working shifts on the corner selling cocaine and spending their time off fighting stolen pit bulldogs to the death. The members of a once-proud street gang who've lost their fortunes in a cloud of crack smoke. A seven-foot-six-inch, Sudanese-born basketball player-the first time he attempted a dunk, he broke his front teeth on the rim. He went on to become one of the greatest shot-blockers in the history of the National Basketball Association. We spend time with blue-collar tweakers in Hawaii; Aryan Nation troopers in Idaho; and near-fatally hip heroin addicts on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. We meet the Reverend Al Sharpton at a time, early in his career, when this important civil rights figure was vilified and feared by many people of all races. A road trip across the country brings Sager eyeball to eyeball with a number of America's smartest men (and one woman). Life, it turns out, can be just as challenging on either end of the bell curve. We attend the ten-night "Superbowl of Rodeo" in Las Vegas with the world's winningest professional cowboy, a deep dive into red-state values and the American Western Ideal. We meet Charlie Van Dyke, 650 pounds, a fat man in a no-fat world, and Bill Hicks, a comedic genius destined for mainstream stardom until tragedy struck. And we spend seven days with NBA lightning rod Kobe Bryant, who lifted the craft of basketball into compelling art . . . and so beautifully made the tricky transition to the next chapter . . . before leaving the earth suddenly and way too soon. Also included: six feature stories written during Sager's early years at the Washington Post, where he began his career as a copy boy in 1978. He has since completed assignments in six subsequent decades.

When Jimmy Nail finally gets around to reading the phenomenally popular novel The Left-Handed Girl, written by the iconic P.J. Darbin, he recognizes it immediately. It's his own book, the short novel The Allergic Boy, that Jimmy had written back in college, and given to Darbin to read when they were both eager college students. That was before Jimmy dropped out of school. Before Jimmy joined the Army. Before Jimmy suffered a severe head injury that leaves him with screaming headaches and occasional confusion. 
But it's his book. He knows it's his, even if no one will believe him. Not his wife. Not Darbin's big-city publisher. Not Darbin's team of lawyers. And not the mean-spirited judge who's assigned to hear Jimmy's lawsuit. 
How can Jimmy prove that he's the true author of the hit novel and not just a greedy and addled war veteran with a head injury and a frivolous claim? 
When his dusty old notebooks and his own memory convince no one, Jimmy knows that his only hope is to find the red-haired girl he'd been mad about as a teenager, the enigmatic Poppy Fowler. 
Or Poppy Fahrenberg. 
Or Poppy Fahrenheit. 
Whatever her surname, she is Jimmy Nail's one and only hope. 
His one and only hope for love. 
His one and only hope to establish his sanity. 
And his one and only hope to get the credit he deserves. The money, too. He can't forget the money. 
But did Poppy even exist, or was she just the creation of Jimmy's sad and troubled mind? 
Jimmy has lost everything. He's lost his wife and his daughter. He's lost his parents. He's lost his savings. What he hasn't lost is his love for a red-haired girl who may have been the basis for a novel that has made someone else world-famous and awfully rich. 
In this unique and inventive novel, Michael Kun explores the nature of truth, the imperfection of memory, and the very idea of love. As Jimmy Nail learns that he must love whom he loves, regardless of appearance and even gender, Kun infuses Jimmy's quest with humor and emotional depth.

The Allergic Boy Versus the Left-Handed Girl

Kun, Michael

Humor & Satire

Walt Harrington has been one of the most impactful journalists in the modern wave of long-form creative nonfiction. The Detective: And Other True Stories features some of the highlights of Harrington's long career as an award-winning author, Washington Post Magazine writer, journalism professor/university administrator, and mentor to several generations of writers that have followed him in the practice of his Intimate Journalism, codified in a much-assigned university textbook he wrote to codify his practice and philosophy of the craft.\nOver 30 years, Harrington did scores of profiles of people both famous and obscure. His goal: "To make ordinary people extraordinary and extraordinary people ordinary." A selection of the best stories in both categories-eight articles-are collected here.\nIn the title piece, Harrington embeds with a homicide detective during the height of the crack and murder epidemic of the 1990s. In "A Narrow World Made Wide," he embeds in quite a different environment, the writing studio of U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove. From there he takes the reader through the looking glass of the exacting, protracted, ritualized, and intimate process of writing a single poem-becoming in the process a story about the ethereal act of creativity itself.\nOther stories include: a Harvard Law School grad who eschews a big-bucks job to make $24,000 a year trying to save convicted felons from death sentences; the trials and joys of a pair of sisters as they do their best to care for their aged, once-powerful father; an insider's look at the extraordinary life of civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks; a deeply reported profile of the 41st president of the U.S., George Herbert Walker Bush, followed by an account of the unlikely friendship Harrington developed with the 43rd president, George W. Bush, known as Dubya. Finally, Harrington turns his thoughts inward with an essay about his own father and son, and the bridge between the generations.\nEach Harrington story is a precious gem, mined, cut, polished, and set by a master craftsman. Like a valuable piece of woodwork or a beautiful song, they stand alone as totems of thought and ideas, artful and full of insight. By chronicling the ordinary lives of the famous and obscure with hard-eyed compassion, Harrington reveals not only the true natures of his subjects but also the values they hold within the cultures they inhabit. In this way, his stories are as much about his readers as his subjects, a clue to understanding the conditions of others, something that could well serve our divided world of today.

The Detective: And Other True Stories

Biographies & Memoirs

Harrington, Walt

Community & Culture

My Father's Con: A Memoir

"My father's name was Pasquale Giordano. Or Patsy Giordano. Or Patsy Jordan. Or Patrick Michaele Jordan. Like everything about his life, even his name was elusive." So begins My Father's Con, a Memoir, by Pat Jordan, the octogenarian former pro baseball prospect-considered for a time to be one of the hardest throwing pitchers in the minor leagues-who later became an award-winning sportswriter. Jordan is the author of a dozen books, including A False Spring, a bittersweet memoir of his baseball career, ranked #37 on Sports Illustrated's Top 100 Sports Books of All Time. Now, with the elegant ease of a craftsman who has worked at his trade every day for nearly sixty years, Jordan tries to make sense of his life before and after baseball, starting with the story of his father-a grifter and gambler who would come to be known in his dotage as Il Professore, the professor emeritus of con. An accounting of an extraordinary life, lived beneath the long shadow of "the exquisite perfection of my father's con."

Jordan, Pat.

Historical

Pamela Hill Nettleton is a writer, editor, and professor who has taught writing at top universities for three decades. Everyone knows she loves her students. She's loved for loving her students.\nBut Lord. Their essays.\nSometimes she'll laugh so hard she has Earl Gray squirting out of her nose. Other times, she'll feel like weeping quietly into a handkerchief. On occasion, she spots something so egregious she's forced to give up grading for the night and head straight for the chocolate.\nEach of the 250 quotes in this book is from a real student, submitted in an actual assignment. The punctuation, spelling, grammar, and conceptual errors are left intact as written. Most are from Nettleton's college courses; some have been provided by colleagues who have followed her hilarious posts on social media for years.\nAs it turns out, these gaffes, goofs, and blunders are excellent for use (anonymously in future classes) as a teaching aid. Seeing actual mistakes made by peers, students are often galvanized to (gasp!) reread their sentences and double-check their work, lest they end up in the next edition of Students Write the Darnedest Things.\nIn the end, Nettleton writes, "The students who made these errors of haste, naivete, inexperience, and-I'll go ahead and say it-the passing cluelessness of youth, help us all challenge our assumptions and work to express ourselves more clearly."\nDedicated to student writers everywhere-and especially to the teachers who read them.

Students Write the Darnedest Things: Gaffes, Goofs, Blunders and Unintended Wisdom from Actual College Papers

Humor & Entertainment

Nettleton, Pamela Hill

Humor

Notes from the Road: A Filmmaker's Journey through American Music

Mugge, Robert

Arts & Literature

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Books by Sager Group LLC