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.

The bestselling book that became a scandal!

In 1923, Joan Lowell was an aspiring writer and rising silent film star in Hollywood. She published her autobiography in 1929: a rip-roaring memoir of a young girl growing up on a schooner with her hearty sea captain father and a crew of salty sailors and the incredible and death-defying adventures she had traveling the world. People loved the thrilling adventures of young Joan. The book was a runaway best-seller in 1929 with over 100,000 copies sold in under three months.

Except…none of the story was true! The truth was revealed a few months after publication—Joan had never sailed beyond the California shores.

Amidst the scandal, Joan remained defiant, telling the Pittsburgh Press in 1930, “Eighty percent of it was true and the rest I colored up. I made some changes to protect people and the rest to make it better reading. That’s an author’s privilege.”

This edition features archival photos and press clippings and a short biography of Joan Lowell and her infamous book.

Joan Lowell was born in 1902 in Berkeley, California as Helen Wagner to a middle-class family. Yes, her father was a Pacific Ocean merchant schooner captain. And yes, he took Joan—and her mother—on a 15-month sailing adventure when she was a girl. Aside from her film career, Joan Lowell worked as a tabloid reporter and continued to write books—including Reporter Gal (1933) and Promised Land (1952). In addition to writing, she ran a large coffee plantation in Brazil from 1936 until her death in 1967.

With savage humor, Death Confetti is performance artist Jennifer Robin’s collection of autobiographical sketches of Portland, Oregon, from grunge-era obscurity to its current media-darling status.

As an only child raised by reclusive grandparents in upstate New York, Jennifer recalls that she felt “anemic for the real.” At seventeen she broke loose and made her way to the west coast.

“Civilization is a nightmare-illusion,” Jennifer writes, “a three-dimensional spreadsheet perpetuated by machines that hypnotize meat.”

In a city that’s stranger than fiction, grocery-store checkers and meth-heads loom as lost gods. We’re introduced to the lady tweaker “Chew Toy,” who wears moon boots and sings hair-metal songs all night as she collects recyclable bottles. Jennifer visits a bar where executives simulate doggie-style sex acts on the dance floor. Then there’s the tales of late-night life on the city’s buses and light rail.

Jennifer reflects on her early terror in Catholic school and phone calls with her far-out mother, who disclosed that her gynecologist was a murderer. In the all-too-true pages of Death Confetti, Robin remembers her life among noise musicians, junkies, and her escape from a boyfriend who insisted on reviving the lives of hundreds of deceased fruit flies.

Death Confetti jolts the senses, and lingers like a mosquito bite to the Portland of everybody’s soul.

Jennifer Robin lives in Portland, Oregon. She writes grotesque prose. Her novel, Bouzi, was published in 1999.

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.