Notes from the Other Side of America

Pulphead

A sharp-eyed, uniquely humane tour of America's cultural landscape - from high to low to lower than low - by the award-winning young star of the literary world

The ghost of Mark Twain is evoked in this outstanding collection of essays

Pulphead is a big, fat, frequently exhilarating collection

Pulphead has a ramshackle loquacity, a down-home hyper-eloquence and an off-the-wallishness that is quite distinct - and highly addictive

The best, and most important collection of magazine writing since David Foster Wallace's A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

From prehistoric caves to Axl Rose's oxygen chamber, Sullivan's generous, witty voice lights up every page

The most involving collection of essays to appear in many a year

I was totally blown away by this collection of the new new new journalism, or however many "news" we’re up to these days. I think I like it as much – at times, even more – than Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never do Again. And that, for me, is saying a lot

The best non-fiction... whether he’s writing about the southern literary tradition or smoking pot in Disneyland, the man is astute, funny and wonderful company

The essay collection continues to thrive; of the many I came across this year, the best ... [included] Pulphead

Magnificent ... elegant, engaged and full of feeling... I’ve lost count of the number of people I’ve pressed it on

Proof of the power of non-fiction to defamiliarise the ordinary and familiarise the strange... a Cadillac-on-the-freeway tour of Americana

Pulls off quite a trick ... he mines the residual weirdness and oddities of the “other side of America” without ever condescending to his subjects

Slangy, reported, in the moment... a collection of smart and fizzy magazine pieces

Of these essays I really, really liked the one on Michael Jackson... Sullivan tells us more interesting stuff in this one essay than everything else I’ve read put together... Sullivan tries to understand the way Jackson thought

Simultaneously folksy, modern, curious, confiding and rigorously intellectual

The Southern editor of the Paris Review can write as scintillatingly about the tea party, Michael Jackson or Hurricane Katrina as he can about rare Southern folk blues or American reality television

Of these essays, I really, really liked the one on Michael Jackson. Sullivan tells us more interesting stuff in this one essay than everything else I’ve read put together - the ancestors who were slaves, the scandals, the voice, the way he composed music; Sullivan tries to understand the way Jackson thought

John Jeremiah Sullivan is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and the southern editor of The Paris Review. He writes for GQ, Harper's Magazine, and Oxford American, and is the author of Blood Horses and Pulphead. Sullivan lives in Wilmington, North Carolina.

John Jeremiah Sullivan takes us on a funhouse hall-of-mirrors ride through the other side of America - to the Ozarks for a Christian rock festival; to Florida to meet the straggling refugees of MTV's Real World; to Indiana to investigate the formative years of Michael Jackson and Axl Rose and then to the Gulf Coast in the wake of Katrina - and back again as its residents confront the BP oil spill. Simultaneously channeling the gonzo energy of Hunter S. Thompson and the wit and insight of Joan Didion, Sullivan - with a laidback, erudite Southern charm that's all his own - shows us how America really (no, really) lives now.

John Jeremiah Sullivan

An interestingly wayward memoir, exploring […] the vibrant mixture of equine beauty and human ugliness to be found on the racetrack

A great father-son memoir, and a good book about horses, too

You needn’t love horses to find this idiosyncratic memoir a joy

This is desperately sad, life-affirming and just about wonderful. It is the book every father would want his son to write about him

As a memoir, an elegy and a piece of investigative journalism, it dazzles

Sullivan has found the transcendent in the house

Bracingly eccentric…Sullivan is a remarkable writer

It's a good, funny, moving book... [Sullivan] is unfailingly good company, always curious, often very funny

Sullivan knows how to craft a paragraph and tell a story

This morning Blood Horses showed up in the post. It’s Sullivan’s first book, a memoir about his late sportswriter father as well as a study of equine racing and breeding and obsessing over. We’re only 30 pages in but we’re convinced Sullivan wins it by a length and then some. He’s the best thing to come out of the south since 2 Chainz

A truly fascinating and brilliantly written memoir recounting Sullivan’s relationship with his writer father but also a detailed examination of horse racing, the love of his father’s life, as well as an entire treatise on the relationship between man and horse

Blood Horses blends history, reportage and personal essay. The book is an excellent example of the mixed form that the critic Northrop Frye once called an “anatomy”. [Sullivan’s] enthusiasm rubs off

Brilliant, sometimes maddeningly discursive memoir… Sullivan writes beautifully. Blood Horses makes better reading than the smoothly finished works of less witty and accomplished writers

All the elegance and craft [Sullivan] displayed in [Pulphead] are present once again

Luminous, hard-to-characterise book... By the sheer fizzing excellence of his writing [Sullivan] carries off the difficult task he set himself triumphantly

It’s a daring approach combining memoir and reportage and, beneath it all, the autobiographical theme of his attempt to understand his father, but it works magnificently

The prose is relaxed, the choice of material telling; it is once more a delight to be in his company

One evening late in his life, veteran sportswriter Mike Sullivan was asked by his son what he remembered best from his three decades in the press box. The answer came as a surprise. 'I was at Secretariat's Derby, in '73. That was ... just beauty, you know?' 
 
John Jeremiah Sullivan didn't know, not really, but he spent two years finding out, journeying from prehistoric caves to the Kentucky Derby. The result is Blood Horses, a wise, humorous and often beautiful memoir exploring the relationship between man and horse and the relationship between a sportswriter’s son and his late father.

John Jeremiah Sullivan

Praise for Blood Horses

An interestingly wayward memoir, exploring […] the vibrant mixture of equine beauty and human ugliness to be found on the racetrack

A great father-son memoir, and a good book about horses, too

You needn’t love horses to find this idiosyncratic memoir a joy

An interestingly wayward memoir, exploring […] the vibrant mixture of equine beauty and human ugliness to be found on the racetrack

A great father-son memoir, and a good book about horses, too

You needn’t love horses to find this idiosyncratic memoir a joy

An interestingly wayward memoir, exploring […] the vibrant mixture of equine beauty and human ugliness to be found on the racetrack

A great father-son memoir, and a good book about horses, too

You needn’t love horses to find this idiosyncratic memoir a joy

Books by John Jeremiah Sullivan

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