“Bogosian’s script retains the playwright-performer’s trademark vitriol and hammer wit.”—Time Out

This new version of Eric Bogosian’s best-selling play, set in a convenience store parking lot, premiered last season Off Broadway. His rewrites—for a world seeped in cell phones, hip-hop, and a new political context—render the piece “an American anyplace where everything, yet nothing, has changed” (The New York Times).

Eric Bogosian’s plays and solo shows include Talk Radio (Pulitzer Prize finalist); Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll; Pounding Nails in the Floor with My Forehead; and Drinking in America. He has received three OBIE awards and has toured throughout the country.

Lee Child recruits Joyce Carol Oates, Jonathan Ames, Cara Black, and others to reveal nicotine's scintillating alter egos.

"Typically for Akashic--publisher of the terrific Noir series--the stories approach the subject matter from an impressive number of angles...Akashic has yet to produce a dull anthology, and this one is especially good."
--Booklist

"Sixteen tributes to America's guiltiest pleasure...Even confirmed anti-smokers will find something to savor."
--Kirkus Reviews

"The most successful entries delve bone-deep into addiction, as characters smoke to smother physical pain, loneliness, and their days...These writers capture the mental gymnastics behind the characters' bad decisions, and the joy such bad decisions can bring."
--Publishers Weekly

In recent years, nicotine has become as verboten as many hard drugs. The literary styles in this volume are as varied as the moral quandaries herein, and the authors have successfully unleashed their incandescent imaginations on the subject matter, fashioning an immensely addictive collection.

Featuring brand-new stories by: Lee Child, Joyce Carol Oates, Jonathan Ames, Eric Bogosian, Achy Obejas, Michael Imperioli, Hannah Tinti, Ariel Gore, Bernice L. McFadden, Cara Black, Christopher Sorrentino, David L. Ulin, Jerry Stahl, Lauren Sanders, Peter Kimani, and Robert Arellano.

From the introduction by Lee Child:

Food scientists have discovered a complex compound naturally present in, among other things, potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants. The compound offers us a number of benefits: it improves our fine motor skills; it increases our attention spans; it improves our cognitive abilities; it improves our long- and short-term memories; it lessens depression...In and of itself, it has no real downside. It's called nicotine. We should all get some.

The problem is the delivery system...The most efficient way is to burn dried tobacco leaves and inhale the smoke. Ten seconds later, the compound is in your brain, doing good in all its various ways. Unfortunately, the rest of the smoke doesn't do good. And therein lies a great mystery of human behavior. To get the good, we risk the bad. Or we prohibit ourselves the good, for fear of the bad. Which approach makes more sense?

Eric Bogosian is one of our most singular and exhilarating commentators on American life. His award-winning solo performance works have been performed with acclaim all over the world. As the New York Times has pointed out, “Bogosian is a born storyteller with perfect pitch.” That is never more evident than in his newest book, which collects his three most recent plays. In Humpty Dumpty, five friends gather for a holiday at a mountain getaway where unforeseen events bring them to the brink of the end of the world; Griller, set in a New Jersey backyard, where a barbecue gathering turns sinister and deadly; and Red Angel, Bogosian’s riff on Von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel, reset on a college campus in 1990s New England.

“I want theater to wake me up, not lull me to sleep. My theater is not about fantasy, it’s not about seduction. My theater is not an outline for a film. It is not a TV sitcom onstage. I want my theater to be an event. I want it to push limits, bite the hand that feeds it and bang heads. It’s about my fears, my ideas, my blind spots, my isolation.”—Eric Bogosian

Eric Bogosian is the author of five plays including Talk Radio and subUrbia, as well as three Obie Award-winning solos: Drinking in America; Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll; Pounding Nails in the Floor with My Forehead and his most recent, Wake Up and Smell the Coffee, which was nominated for a Drama Desk Award. He wrote the screenplay adaptations of his first two plays, receiving the Berlin Film Festival’s “Silver Bear” for his work in Talk Radio. Simon and Schuster will publish his second novel in 2005.

“Your fear, your own lives, have become your entertainment.”—Talk Radio

“More timely today than it was twenty years ago . . . Radio crackles with intensity.”—Joe Dziemianowicz, New York Daily News

“The most lacerating portrait of a human meltdown this side of a Francis Bacon painting. . . . This revival, like the original production, allows its star to grab an audience by the lapels and shake it into submission.”—Ben Brantley, The New York Times

Eric Bogosian’s Talk Radio—his breakthrough 1987 Public Theater hit that was made into a film by Oliver Stone—has been revived in a “mesmerizing” (Newsday) production on Broadway, with Liev Schreiber playing the role of the late-night shock jock that Bogosian himself originated. The drama is set in the studio of Cleveland’s WTLK Radio over the course of Barry Champlain’s two-hour broadcast, being scrutinized that night by producers with an interest in taking the show national, and fueled as always by coffee, cocaine, and Jack Daniel’s. Barry’s jousts with his unseen callers—ranging from a white supremacist to a woman obsessed with her garbage disposal—are peppered with insights into his character from his ex-deejay pal and his sometime girlfriend/producer, and punctuated with a transformative visit from an embodied voice.

Eric Bogosian is a writer and actor who over the last twenty years has authored five full-length plays and created six full-length solos for himself, including subUrbia; Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll; Pounding Nails in the Floor with My Forehead;and Drinking in America. He is the recipient of three OBIE Awards and a Drama Desk Award, and has toured throughout the United States and Europe.

100% pure high octane Bogosian.

Bogosian's latest and greatest monologue.

"His wit is as venomous as ever, his material even more devastating and polished than before."—New York Daily News

"Bogosian hasn't simply crossed the line of good taste, he has snorted it."—The Daily Texan

Wake Up is Bogosian's meditation on making it to the top of the ladder, on falling off the ladder and on the exhilarating thrill of the ultimate crash and burn. Once again the author offers a blisteringly funny and dead-on take of the chaos and alienation of post-modern life in the U. S. of the year 2000. As Michael Feingold so ably offered in his Village Voice review—"Bogosian is there, watching out for the downtrodden, ridiculing the arrogant rich, defending battered wives and neo-hippie hitchhikers and never losing sight of his own capacity for being classed among the batters and bullies. But his 95 minutes is as fast and exciting a read as the theatre community offers. In our time, the stage has almost been what classical thinkers saw it as, a medium for criticizing life. How perfect that a solo performer should rediscover its roots, by choosing his own life as the object of his criticism."

Eric Bogosian, born in Woburn, Massachusetts, has performed his plays and monologues at venues nationwide. Winner of Obie and Drama Desk Awards, he has made four films of his work, most notably Talk Radio and Suburbia. His novel Mall was recently published by Simon and Schuster.

"A born storyteller with perfect pitch."—The New York Times

"Greatly and bilaterally talented . . . spiky, stinging, caustic without cauterizing. And funny."—New York

One of America's premier performers and most innovative and provocative artists offers his two newest plays: Skunkweed details the culture clash between a Los Angeles screenwriter and a working-class girl and her rural Florida clan in a hotel room, and 1+1 explores desire, greed, and responsibility to others through the lives of an aspiring actress, assistant restaurant manager, and a photographer. About the characters in 1+1, Eric Bogosian recently stated, "Bri, Phil, and Carl are based on people I've found intensely interesting my whole life: a good-looking hustler, an ambitious pretty girl, and a 'good guy' who always seems to finish last. . . . The story is a parable. All my plays are. My plays are not expositions of a specific time and place. Rather, I try to find a way to set them so that the audience can immerse itself in a situation. I don't have answers. I have questions."

Eric Bogosian is a writer and actor who has authored five full-length plays and created six full-length solos for himself, including Talk Radio; subUrbia; Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll; Pounding Nails in the Floor with My Forehead; and Drinking in America. He is the recipient of three OBIE Awards and a Drama Desk Award, and has toured throughout the United States and Europe.