Jay A. Gertzman - author's blog

NB: FOR OLDER POST ON WILL EISNER'S _A CONTRACT WITH GOD_, please click on"Oct 2012," below right

Selected Works

Biography

The life of a man of various personae: religious poet, erotica dealer, jailbird, and scapegoat.

"Absorbing account of an often overlooked corner of American publishing history. . . . Only by understanding the quintessentially American nature of the business, [Gertzman] argues, can we understand the eroticized culture we inhabit today.” Publishers Weekly, May 3, 1999

Quick Links

"Sleaziest Pig in the World"?

A consideration of the paradoxes in the Career of Samuel Roth

A Demon in Galicia, Its Exorcism, and What Happened After

Bookleggers and Smuthounds

"Michael Perkins' _Dangerous Companions_: A Classic Porno Noir"

A subversive anarchist novel set in the East Village during the Vietnam War, in the tradition of Bataille and Burrroughs

The Bookshops of Times Square, 1960-1980s

The vitality of the world's largest honky-tonk mass entertainment zone

"Soft Core Publishing: The East Coast Scene" (1950s)

A Descriptive Bibliography of Lady Chatterley's Lover: With Essays Toward a Publishing History of the Novel

Fantasy, Fashion, and Affection: Editions of Robert Herrick's Poetry for the Common Reader, 1810-1968

Authors Guild

Advocates for published authors since 1912

Authors Guild Directory

A compendium of member websites

Anthony Weiner, who never backed down from a bully, telling a heckler who yelled "scumbag" at him that if he thought he could so judge another by shouting at him in public, he should have a long talk with his Rabbi

Wife: "Issac, you've got 15 minutes left on the Ipad." (Your Jewish dad is waiting.) A good illustration for Apple's stories, but many of them are set in Texas. . .

a Lower East Side tenement

From the cover of Bill Griffith's _Invisible Ink_, his graphic memoir of his mother's illicit affair

To a point, Roth did this. In The _Trial_, this is the brave yet death-seeking point Joseph K reaches, I think by personal choice

French edition of the novel, with appropriate title

Joseph Conrad, who met his own nemesis as a sailor, at about the same age as the Captain in "A Smile of Fortune"

Philip (Nathan Zuckerman?) and Ike (Saul Bellow in real life, but there ids another character that seems to have his likeness)

Kersh's milieu

Four Sad, Empathetic, Perseverant Ghosts

Henry Kane was prolific: he created TV PI series, and wrote over 50 novels (some under pen names).

from right: the degenerate gambler John Ireland), the gangster (Barry Sullivan), a bright-eyed bobby soxer, the soda jerker (Henry Morgan)

The famous Bond sign in Times Square, 1948-54. It was 7 stories high and had 2 miles of neon.

"She looks excited about the possibility that it will get very rough, indeed." (see "pop sensation" website)

Its cold in the Village, 1961, but this is not Dylan

About infection, guilt, harm and harmlessness, the fight against self-hate, and how not to fight the human stain

frontispiece to "In New York"

My favorite wedding jester

"I don't have my autograph. But you can have my footprints. There're upstairs in my socks."

Jakie's s father is about to tell his apostate son "I taught you to sing to God. . . but you liked better to sing in beer halls."

Artaud's book was subtitled "The Crowned Anarchist"--sun, shadows, snakes, tumescence, transgressive youth

My Friend Yeshea was Samuel Roth's last novel, written during his final prison term and published shortly thereafter (1961).

author's blog

Lilith, Hasidic Folklore in a Pulp Crime Paperback, 1952

September 8, 2015

Tags: Lilith, doppleganger, demons, incest, David Goodis, noir, fetish, Freud, the uncanny, obsession

A sister, a Lilith, a monster of the morbid imagination. Serpent's Tale edition of the novel

David Goodis’ _Of Tender Sin_ (1952) was published as a mass-market pulp novel of mean streets, crime, and forbidden love (“strange bypaths of his own twisted emotions”). Beyond those selling points are sexual desire thwarted by a primordial sense of guilt, sado-masochism, incest, romantic idealism contrasted with demeaning lust, and a vivid picture of slum life in post-war America. These topics appeared in many crime novels by writers such as Charles Willeford, Jim Thompson, Dorothy B Hughes, Horace McCoy, and others. What is exceptional in Of Tender Sin is not, therefore, his allusions to Freud, Faulkner, Hemingway, or Kafka, or that Goodis used folklore and myth to drive his narrative pace. What was unique was that Goodis chose biblical and Hasidic story involving deadly storms, doppelgangers and demons, especially Lilith. If there is a more noirish work of literature than the Old Testament (Tanack), shout it out.
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A top pulp mystery writer's father tries to get his son to say Kaddish for him

July 26, 2014

Tags: kaddish, the uncanny, mystery, Henry Kane, Robert Block, ghost story

Here is a true story about a son who would not let his father control his way of expressing himself, even if it meant that, from beyond the grave, his father would keep his son in scalp tingling fear.

"Henry Kane was in his early fifties when I [fellow mystery writer, the great Lawrence Block] got to know him, and some years previously his father had died. And ever since then, Kane had heard footsteps.

Not all the time, to be sure. But every now and then he would hear someone pacing the floor overhead, walking back and forth, back and forth. At first he’d thought there was in fact someone up there, but it even happened when he was on the top floor, or sitting home in an otherwise empty house. It became clear that he was hearing these footsteps, and there were no feet responsible. Read More

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