Orders placed directly with Feral House receive a signed photo of Eugene Robinson. Quantities are very limited.

A rollicking no-holds barred memoir from journalist and musician Eugene S. Robinson that takes readers along through the story of his life.

“A weird rollicking ride” frames how author Eugene S. Robinson views his journey from a Brooklyn kid with decidedly offbeat punk rock proclivities to the realities of California hardcore and dark detours into shows, tours, drugs, porn, guns, MMA fighting, an Ivy League-esque education and his eventual entry into the US Defense industry just in time to see his boss dragged into Contragate.

Robinson’s writing mirrors his fighting style intensity, ferocity, and brutal truth. He knows exactly who he is and how he is perceived by the white people and white culture that surrounds him. Robinson challenges accepted norms. He fights against easy answers and safe passages. He says:

“No one who ever gets a life sentence for just about anything really expects it to last a lifetime. Even if the modifier is “without the possibility of parole.” Hope springs eternal but there’s always the undiscussed other option. The one where the fate is chosen, freely, and the protagonist has about as much interest in escaping as he does of being almost anywhere else at all. Which is to say: not at all.”

A Walk Across Dirty Water is Robinson’s memoir of growing up in Brooklyn during the 1970s, playing in punk bands and touring the world during the eighties, taking a break to attend Stanford, and accidentally becoming a famous television personality in Germany.

“I’m sorry to see you here, but had you fought like a man, you need not be hanged like a dog.”
(Anne Bonny to her husband, Calico Jack Rackham)

The story of the most famous female pirate in history provides a remarkable personal odyssey from a time when women were almost powerless and at the lowest level of the social order on both sides of the Atlantic. This new biographical work fills considerable gaps in Anne Bonny’s life beyond her mythology to rescue an actual person for posterity.

Born in scandal in Ireland then emigrating to the American Colonies, she turned her back on the rigid South Carolina plantation lifestyle to find a sense of personal freedom, Anne Bonny sailed the Caribbean’s pristine waters during the Golden Age of Piracy in the early eighteenth century. Few accurate records exist about these law-breakers, whose lifestyles called for hanging. Fortunately, Anne Bonny was a notable exception to the rule, as she was caught off the Jamaican coast and tried by a court of law, whose records have fortunately survived.

So, who was the real Anne Bonny? A heartless prostitute, a bloodthirsty psychopath, or a compassionate woman of faith and courage? Such a fundamental question has not been adequately answered by historians for 300 years.  Anne Bonny: The Infamous Female Pirate takes a fresh look at the life of Anne Bonny to present a corrective view into not only her story but also the seldom explored, but incredibly rich, field of women’s history.

Author Phillip Thomas Tucker, has earned acclaim and recognition as an award-winning American historian and author. Fundamentally a corrective scholar of outdated and traditional history, he has written ground-breaking books about some of the most iconic moments of American history.

Feral House presents an irreverent, educational and entertaining collection of essays by the Great Contrarian of graphic design, Art Chantry.

“There used to be a time when designers were trained in the history of composition. Now you just buy a fuckin’ piece of software and now you’ve become a designer.”

“Art Chantry . . . Is he a Luddite?” asks a Rhode Island School of Design poster promoting a Chantry lecture. “Or is he a graphic design hero?”

For decades this avatar of low-tech design has fought against the cheap and easy use of digital software. Chantry’s homage to expired technology, and his inspired use of Xerox machines and X-Acto blade cuts of printed material, created a much-copied style during the grunge period and beyond.

Chantry’s designs were published in Some People Can’t Surf: The Graphic Design of Art Chantry (Chronicle Books), exhibited at the Seattle Art Museum, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian, and the Louvre.

Recently, Chantry has drawn upon his extraordinary collection of 20th-century graphic art to create compelling histories of the forgotten and unknown in essays he has posted on his Facebook page. These essays lionize the unrecognized illustrators of screws, wrenches, and pipes in equipment catalogs, and reveal how some famous artists were improperly recognized for work they didn’t create.

Art Chantry Speaks is the kind of opinionated art history you’ve always wanted to read but were never assigned in class.

 

What goes on in Antarctica?

Is it the pristine but harsh frontier where noble scientific missions are accomplished? Or an insane corporate bureaucracy where hundreds of workers are cooped together in hi-tech communes with all the soul of a suburban office park?

Welcome to Big Dead Place, a grunt’s eye view of America’s Antarctic Program that shatters the well-worn clichés of polar literature. Here the heroic camaraderie and romantic desolation give way to sterile buildings populated by characters like a crazed manager who fills his boots with antifreeze, the greasepaint-obsessed worker Boozy the Clown, ghosts that haunt the food freezer, and horny employees who grab rare private moments coupling on the altar in the Chapel of the Snows.

The Foreword is by Eirik Sønneland, who claims the longest unsupported ski trek in the continent’s history. Also included is a glossary of Antarctic slang and bureaucratese, and 16 pages of color photographs.

Author Nicholas Johnson (now deceased) worked as a fish-cannery cleaner in the Aleutian Islands, an office manager at a software company, a sales clerk at Banana Republic, a taxi driver in Seattle, an English teacher in South Korea, and as a valet at International House of Pancakes. He has spent five summers and two winters in Antarctica. His website, BigDeadPlace.com, provides an irreverent, no-nonsense perspective of Antarctic employment.

“Even in Antarctica, hash still needs to be slung, dishes need to be washed, and the support workers at the three high-tech science bases operated for the US Government by the Raytheon Company are not often happy bunnies. They are mostly neurotic misfits. A SWAT team of corporate psychologists is sent in every year to assess personnel for symptoms of lunacy before the long, cold Antarctic night closes in. Johnson’s savagely funny story of life ‘Inside the Strange and Menacing World of Antarctica’ is a grunt’s-eye view of fear and loathing, arrogance and insanity in a dysfunctional, dystopian closed community. It’s like M*A*S*H on ice, a bleak, black comedy.”
— The Times of London

“Everyday life in modern Antarctica is not the struggle against the forces of nature that is often portrayed in the stories of the early Explorers… this humorous and often wittily sarcastic account of a place that people tend to romanticize should be read by anyone seriously considering working in Antarctica; it is also the only book available that shows modern Antarctic life and culture from the worker’s perspective… Recommended.”
— Library Journal

“Imagine H.L. Mencken on an ice floe… caustic and brilliant.”
— Yahoo Picks, “What’s New”

“Big Dead Place is the latest in a long line of accounts by polar ‘expeditioners,’ extending backwards to Frederick Cook of the Belgica Expedition, of the hardships of living and working in the highest, driest, coldest, and windiest continent on earth. Johnson’s tales of life at McMurdo Station, Antarctica, are often humorous, occasionally tragic, but always on target. They offer ample evidence that the greatest hardship associated with the Antarctic today is not the cold or any of the other elements of the physical environment, but a social environment created by the mismatch between a group of free-spirited individuals seeking adventure and a bureaucratic system whose primary goal seems to be exerting control in a place where control is an all but impossible task.”
— Lawrence A. Palinkas, Ph.D., University of California, San Diego

“(T)his memoir offers an insider’s look at a place that few people know anything about and fewer still have ever seen.”
— Publishers Weekly

“A personal account so full of history, hilarity, and raucous events that I can’t stop rereading it! Johnson’s voice is witty, insightful, and articulate as he details his fabulous and unforeseen experiences while working at McMurdo Station… in their preposterous glory: hypocritical bureaucracy run amok, not-so-discreet sex in the station chapel, drunken pranksters, and frozen pigs. I can’t get enough.”
— Powell’s Books, staff pick

“Far from the pure white landscape of our collective dreams, Nicholas Johnson’s Antarctica stands out as the fullblown, toxic spawn of America’s culture of corpo-dementia and shit-the-bed planetary greed…. Big Dead Place is some kind of weird masterpiece—Survivor on Ice as imagined by B. Traven. A fascinating, insane, soul-chilling and hysterical portrait of what may yet prove to be future—and future WalMart-adjacent tomb—of Western Civilization.”
— Jerry Stahl

“It took a full century and the building of centrally heated infrastructure for the island at the bottom of the world to produce something like a minor classic. Its author was a young American writer and itinerant contract worker named Nicholas Johnson, whose memoir Big Dead Place upon publication superseded a century’s worth of self-serving ice-beard memoirs and press-junket hackery.”
–Alternet

“No one has done more to change the way we understand Antarctica. Nick was unflinching in his critique of bureaucracy and authority in the United States Antarctic Program, but mainly he sought to create a dialogue within and about Antarctica that cut through cliche and hypocrisy in order to describe things as they really are, in all their glory and strangeness….”
–Progressive Review

The surreal saga of the famous kitsch artists, the Keanes, as seen in Tim Burton’s film Big Eyes.

Teary, big-eyed orphans and a multitude of trashy knockoffs epitomized American kitsch art as they clogged thrift stores for decades.

When Adam Parfrey tracked down Walter Keane—the credited artist of the weepy waifs, for a San Diego Reader cover story in 1992—he discovered some disturbing facts. Decades of lawsuits and countersuits revealed the reality that Keane was more of a con man than an artist, and that he forced his wife Margaret to sign his name to her own paintings. As a result, those weepy waifs may not have been as capricious an invention as they seemed.

Parfrey’s story was reprinted in Juxtapoz magazine and inspired a Margaret Keane exhibition at the Laguna Art Museum. Big Eyes, Tim Burton’s movie about the Keanes,  was released in December 2014. (Burton’s Ed Wood, starring Johnny Depp, was based upon the Feral House book edited and published by Parfrey about the angora sweater-wearing B-film director.)

Citizen Keane is a book-length expansion of Parfrey’s original article, providing fascinating biographical and sociological details, photographs, color reproductions, and appendices with legal documents and pseudonymous essays by Tom Wolfe inflating big eye art to those painted by the great masters.

Violet McNeal ran away from her family’s rural Minnesota farm in the late 1880s and fell under the spell of conman and patent medicine “doctor” Will Archimbauld who hooked her on opium and promises of fame and fortune. Violet soon learned to become Princess Lotus Blossom and was the best pitchman, nostrum seller, and conwoman to roam the west in a torch-lit wagon. Four White Horses and a Brass Band is Violet’s story of life on the road with the medicine show and reveals the secrets of conman’s trade. First published in 1947, the Feral House edition features an extensive afterword on the history of the patent medicine trade and evolution of the lure of miracle cures and healers. Also included are a glossary of the grifter’s cant and samples of scripts used by Violet and other infamous “doctors.”

Vampira is an icon of horror, fashion, and drama—but the woman behind the make-up was far more interesting.

Maila Nurmi, the beautiful and sheltered daughter of Finnish immigrants, stepped off a bus in 1941 Los Angeles intent on finding fame and fortune. What she found were men eager to take advantage of her innocence and beauty.

A talented seamstress, she created a provocative Halloween costume that paved the way to a small role on the Red Skelton Show that then grew into a persona. Vampira brought her the notoriety she desired, yet trapped her in a character she could never truly escape.

This is Maila’s story. Sandra Niemi, Maila’s niece, fills in the nuances of her life before fame and her struggles after the limelight faded as she found a new community within the burgeoning Los Angeles punk scene who embraced her as their own. Maila’s diaries and letters along with interviews with family and friends, bring new insight to her relationships with Orson Welles, James Dean and Marlon Brando.

Includes rare family photographs and revelations that will alter our understanding of Hollywood’s legendary playboys.

Author Bio: Sandra Niemi is Maila’s niece who grew up fascinated by her infamous yet emotionally removed and far away relative. She reconnected with Maila and discovered a trove of her notes and diaries that shed new light on her aunt’s life.

“I’ll roast the goose that pisses on your grave!”

Dirty Helen Cromwell takes you through her life and adventures-from her small-town dreams to how she earned her name. This long-lost autobiography of a woman who lived life with no regrets from the 1880s to the 1960s offers a rare look into the colorful criminal underworld from New York to San Francisco and every whorehouse, tavern, and mining camp in between.

Demure, sweet, yet wild teenage Helen flees from Indiana to Cincinnati with her first of six husbands. She soon realizes that the traditional role of wife and mother isn’t for her. She meets cunning millionaires, bank robbers, detectives, and gangsters as she hustles her way through life. Her friends were everyone else’s enemies ? Al Capone, Big Jim Colosimo and Johnny Torrio all spend time with Helen as she bounces from adventure to adventure.

It’s the true-life story of a woman who never said “No” and carved out an independent life that transgressed every societal boundary.  Her life is a rarely seen look into the reality of a woman who chose sex-work as a path to the good life. This is the story of a mother, a sex-worker and entrepreneur who lived by her own rules.

Helen Worley Cromwell born in Cicero, Indiana in 1886 was known far and wide as “Dirty Helen” because of her poetic and prolific cursing. In the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, her Milwaukee bar was a rendezvous for the famous and the infamous.

Assisted by Robert Dougherty, ‘Dirty Helen’ was first published in 1966. The updated Feral House edition contains private family photos and images from a raucous night at the Sun Flower Inn. Afterword about Helen’s end of life and legacy by Christina Ward.

Harley Flanagan provides a fascinating memoir: a homeless child prodigy and family friend of Andy Warhol and Allen Ginsberg, at a young age he became close to many stars of the early punk rock scene such as Joe Strummer of The Clash and was taught to play bass by members of the famed black punk band Bad Brains. He went on to start the notorious hardcore band Cro-Mags.

From the memoir’s introduction by American Hardcore‘s Steven Blush: “Harley Flanagan is not like you or me. Most of us grew up in relative safety and security. Harley came up like a feral animal, fending for himself in the ’70s Lower East Side jungle of crime, drugs, abuse and poverty. By age 10 he was a downtown star at Max’s Kansas City and CBGB, drumming in his aunt’s punk band The Stimulators, and socializing with Blondie’s Debbie Harry and Cleveland’s Dead Boys. Everyone thought it was so cute, but it wasn’t.”

Harley was never shy: making friends with important figures like Lemmy Kilmister of Motörhead, defending himself in street battles, and, most recently, finding media play and court battles after former band members betrayed their one-time friend and bandmate.

“Harley Flanagan’s incredible story is not just the history of New York hardcore, of which he is a founding father, but a history of New York itself.  It’s all here, an amazing series of unlikely coincidences, catastrophes, accomplishments and associations.  Chances are if it happened in New York and it was important and interesting, Harley Flanagan was somewhere in the room.  If you care anything about music history, punk rock, hardcore or just a ripping good story, this book is the punch in the face you want and need.” – Anthony Bourdain

Hi Jax and Hi Jinx is a black-humored, edgy social comedy based on the real-life experiences of cartoonist and musician/performance artist Dame Darcy, creator of the comix series Meat Cake. Her Gothic Lolita?punk/dada life is a no?holds?barred fight for social justice. Allying herself with witches, the LBGTQ community, billionaires, and Native Americans, Dame Darcy takes on reality television, self-publishing, fine art exhibition, movie production, the patriarchy and the soaring cost of higher education.

“Darcy’s comics are an aesthetic manifesto… Darcy is a star. Mark my words.” —The New York Times

“Her imagery and style may have caught on in the wide world, but the originals are as menacing as ever.” — NPR Book

“She is the Earth’s manifestation of true love. Her desires are delivered through the sensual art of music, lyrics, and visual magic. Dame Darcy is an artist worthy of obsession.” —Thurston Moore, Musician

“Her work is a young Miss Haversham stripped naked by John Ruskin, or at least that’s one of the many delicious images that spring to my mind from the exquisitely strange pages by the ingenious and inexhaustible Dame Darcy!” —Guy Maddin, Filmmaker

“Darcy makes mad and beautiful work.” —Alan Moore comic book artist and author of The Watchmen and V for Vendetta

“Dame Darcy’s art resides at the crossroads between instinct and intellect, and every witch knows how powerful it is to bury talismans in that location. The Intersection. It’s the only place to cast a good spell. ” —Margaret Cho

With 50 plus internationally published graphic novels, cartoonist Dame Darcy is an essential voice in women’s art and cartooning. In 2016, her 500-page, career-spanning comic compilation Meat Cake Bible was published by Fantagraphics.