The Freaks Came Out to Write Lib/E: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture

You either were there or you wanted to be. A defining New York City institution co-founded by Norman Mailer, The Village Voice was the first newspaper to cover hip-hop, the avant-garde art scene, and Off-Broadway with gravitas. It reported on the AIDS crisis with urgency and seriousness when other papers dismissed it as a gay disease. In 1979, the Voice's Wayne Barrett uncovered Donald Trump as a corrupt con artist before anyone else was paying attention. It invented new forms of criticism and storytelling and revolutionized journalism, spawning hundreds of copycats. With more than 200 interviews, including with two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Colson Whitehead, cultural critic Greg Tate, gossip columnist Michael Musto, feminist writers Vivian Gornick and Susan Brownmiller, post-punk band Blondie, sportscaster Bob Costas, and drummer Max Weinberg of Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band, former Voice writer Tricia Romano pays homage to the paper that saved NYC landmarks from destruction and exposed corrupt landlords and judges. This definitive oral history tells the story of journalism, New York City, and American culture--and the most famous alt-weekly of all time.

About the Author :
Tricia Romano began her eight-year career at the Village Voice as an intern, where she went on to write a listings column about upcoming club nights, called "Club Crawl," and later, wrote "Fly Life," a reported nightlife column that gave a bird's eye view into the underbelly of New York nightlife. After the Village Voice, she was the editor-in-chief of The Stranger and then a staff writer at the Seattle Times. She is a freelance writer whose work has been published in the New York Times, Rolling Stone, the Daily Beast, the Los Angeles Times, Slate, Salon, and many more. Jo Anna Perrin is an accomplished audiobook narrator and actor who has appeared in film and television as well as on stage in New York and Los Angeles. Independent of her acting and voiceover work, she is a published author and a professional photographer. Johnny Heller has recorded over eight hundred titles and won multiple Earphones Awards and four prestigious Audie Awards. He one of AudioFile's Top 50 Narrators of the Twentieth Century and was awarded a Golden Voice Lifetime Achievement Award in 2019.

Review :
"[A] lively history of the pioneering alt-weekly." -- "New York Post" "[A] well-made disco ball of a book...[that] may be the best history of a journalistic enterprise I've ever read." -- " New York Times" "A rueful elegy for rawer, cheaper, better days." -- "The Guardian (London)" "Captures...the serious collegiality of a newspaper, the alchemy that happens when a group of people attempt to record the world, together." -- "Financial Times (London)"