Synopses & Reviews
Love All the People, a collection of controversial comedian Bill Hicks stand-up routines, notebooks, journals, and letters, traces his evolution from brilliant conventional stand-up to something far more interesting and dangerous: a comic speaking without fear. The result is a radical philosopher masquerading as a comedian, plumbing the American psyche with challenging (and side-splitting) conclusions. Hicks, who died of cancer in 1993, didnt go the easy way with his humor. He attacked the lies that justified the carnage of the Gulf War, the preposterous power of the mainstream media to confuse and corrupt, and the demeaning cynicism of the marketing culture. In Love All the People, that renegade comic artistry that made Bill Hicks an iconoclastic social commentator is recorded, celebrated, and revealed as true genius in this expanded edition that includes additional routines and other writings.
Synopsis
In 1993, network executives abruptly cut the final appearance of comedian Bill Hicks - a scathing tirade of digs on the Pope and the pro-life movement - from an episode of The Late Show with David Letterman. His banning from the show, along with a profile in The New Yorker by veteran writer John Lahr, catapulted Hicks to national prominence. Just months later, at age 32, he died of pancreatic cancer. Now available for the first time are Hick's most critical and comic observations, gathered from his stand-up routines, diaries, notebooks, letters, and final writings. This collection features his controversial humor and witheringly funny attacks on American culture, from its worship of celebrity and material goods to its involvement in the first Gulf War. Love All the People faithfully traces Hicks's evolution from a funny but conventional stand-up comedian into a fearless and brilliant iconoclast.
Synopsis
It's the end of summer 2003. George W. Bush has recently declared the mission in Iraq accomplished, the unemployment rate is at its highest in years, and Martha Stewart has just been indicted for insider trading. Meanwhile, somewhere in the Midwest, Troy Augustus Loudermilk (fair-haired, statuesque, charismatic) and his companion Harry Rego (definitely none of those things) step out of a silver Land Cruiser and onto the campus of The Seminars, America's most prestigious creative writing program, to which Loudermilk has recently been accepted for his excellence in poetry.
Loudermilk, however, has never written a poem in his life.
Wickedly entertaining, beguiling, layered, and sly, Loudermilk is a social novel for our time: a comedy of errors that deftly examines class, gender, and inheritance, and subverts our pieties about literature, authorship, art making, and the institutions that sustain them.
Synopsis
This posthumous collection features Hicks's controversial humor and witheringly funny attacks on American culture, from its worship of celebrity and material goods to its involvement in the first Gulf War.