Pulphead: Essays

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

In Pulphead, John Jeremiah Sullivan takes us on an exhilarating tour of our popular, unpopular, and at times completely forgotten culture. Simultaneously channeling the gonzo energy of Hunter S. Thompson and the wit and insight of Joan Didion, Sullivan shows us — with a laidback, erudite Southern charm thats all his own — how we really (no, really) live now.

In his native Kentucky, Sullivan introduces us to Constantine Rafinesque, a nineteenth-century polymath genius who concocted a dense, fantastical prehistory of the New World. Back in modern times, Sullivan takes us to the Ozarks for a Christian rock festival; to Florida to meet the alumni and straggling refugees of MTVs Real World, whove generated their own self-perpetuating economy of minor celebrity; and all across the South on the trail of the blues. He takes us 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.

Gradually, a unifying narrative emerges, a story about this country that weve never heard told this way. Its like a fun-house hall-of-mirrors tour: Sullivan shows us who we are in ways weve never imagined to be true. Of course we dont know whether to laugh or cry when faced with this reflection — its our inevitable sob-guffaws that attest to the power of Sullivans work.

"The age-old strangeness of American pop culture gets dissected with hilarious and revelatory precision in these scintillating essays. Whiting Award — winning critic and journalist Sullivan (Blood Horses) surveys 10,000 years of intriguing, inexplicable, and incorrigible socio-aesthetic phenomena, from the ancient Indian cave paintings of Tennessee (and their hillbilly admirers) to the takeover of his Wilmington, N.C., house by the teen soap opera One Tree Hill. Along the way he visits a Christian rock festival brimming with fellowship and frog-devouring savagery; witnesses the collapse of civilization in a post-Katrina gas line; hangs out in the professional-partying demimonde of MTV's RealWorld; marches with exuberant Tea Partiers; scouts the animal kingdom's gathering war on mankind; and traces the rise of rocker Axl Rose from his origins as a weedy adolescent punk in the small-town void of central Indiana. Sullivan views this landscape with love, horror, and fascination, finding the intricate intellectual substructures underlying the banalities, the graceful in the grotesque, the constellations of meaning that fans discern amid the random twinklings of stars. Sullivan writes an extraordinary prose that's stuffed with off-beat insight gleaned from rapt, appalled observations and suffused with a hang-dog charm. The result is an arresting take on the American imagination. (Nov.)" Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

John Jeremiah Sullivan is a contributing editor at Harpers Magazine and the southern editor of The Paris Review. He is the winner of a Whiting Writers Award for emerging writers and a National Magazine Award for feature writing. Born in Louisville, Kentucky, he currently lives in Wilmington, North Carolina, with his wife and two daughters. He is the author of Blood Horses (FSG, 2004).