Eric Bogosian

Almost forty years after moving to Manhattan, author Richard Morris has achieved if not stratospheric renown then at least the accomplished career and caliber of fame that he envisioned for himself as a younger man. Now financially comfortable and artistically embittered, Richard is at his home upstate recuperating from heart surgery and nursing resentment toward his publisher and his reading public who have found new, more exciting writers and left his star to wane. In his attic, Richard comes across a stack of notebooks, the journals he began keeping when he arrived in New York in the late 70s. He is alternately fascinated and repelled by the young man he meets in these pages: hilariously naïve and egotistically misguided, the younger Richard compulsively absorbs everything around him from art and creativity to sex and drugs. As he reads more about himself, written by himself, Richard discovers that the pivotal moments of self-invention -- and self-realization -- occur far outside the conventional chronology of a lifetime. Perforated Heart explores two wholly different characters -- a young, ambitious artist and his older self, jaded by both success and failure -- and creates an unforgettable portrait of the two men who inhabit the one individual. By turns meditative, deftly observant, and scathingly analytical, Eric Bogosian re-creates the landscape and atmosphere of 1970s New York City with fresh, vivid imagery and reveals a powerful commentary on the dynamic between creativity and commerce in the artistic world. Perforated Heart is his most rewarding and penetrating novel yet, with prose that reflects an equally astonishing range of experience and emotion.

In a tale of contemporary urban desperation and desire, Reba Cook, an unusually beautiful woman, struggles with her drug addiction while enduring city life alongside an assortment of neighbors.

“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 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 is set in a New Jersey backyard, where a barbecue gathering turns sinister and deadly. Red Angel is Bogosian’s riff on Von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel , reset on a college campus in 1990s New England.

A farce that turns the American Dream on its head. In GRILLER, set in a New Jersey backyard, a barbecue gathering turns sinister and deadly. 5 men, 4 women

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."

"Mal, a thirty-something speed freak, shoots his mother, torches his house, and heads to the local mall with a sack of weapons and a plan for more mayhem. Danny, a voyeuristic businessman with a fetish for young underwear models, is caught by mall security peeking in dressing rooms at JC Penney. Jeff, a teenager with existential troubles, drops acid and departs on a philosophical nightmare. Donna, a hungry, unsettled housewife, is on the lookout for a one-night stand. Michel, a Haitian immigrant and mall security guard, seeks salvation. All long for a kind of satisfaction, and this longing leads them to the modern plaza of possibility, the shopping mall, where their appetites converge in explosive ways."--BOOK JACKET.

SubUrbia is a play by Eric Bogosian chronicling the nighttime activities of a group of aimless 20-somethings still living in their suburban New Jersey hometown and their reunion with a former high school classmate who has become a successful musician. The musician Pony's return strips away illusions and excuse to reveal the meaningless dead-end existences of everyone.

"Mr. Bogosian has crossed the line that separates an exciting artist from a cultural hero. What Lenny Bruce was to the 1950s, Bob Dylan to the 1960s, Woody Allen to the 1970s – that’s what Eric Bogosian is to this frightening moment of drift… I Know of no one else like him in pop culture right now.” -Frank Rich, New York Times "Pure Theatrical Adrenaline.” -Time Out New York One of America’s premier performers and most original playwrights, Eric Bogosian has earned increasing fame for his disturbing, comic appearances on stage, on film, and on the page. From his earliest evenings of monologues (Men Inside; Voices of America; Funhouse), to his best-known solo shows (Drinking in America; Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll) and his remarkable first play (Talk Radio), Bogosian has explored the dark underbelly of the American dream with blistering prose, trenchant social criticism and breathtakingly accurate characterizations of an astonishing range of fellow citizens. The Essential Bogosian brings together Talk Radio and all of Bogosian’s monologues up through Drinking in America, providing the fullest view yet of this mercurial, much-emulated talent.

In his fifth, brashest solo show, Eric Bogosian again aims scorching social commentary at the contemporary urban and suburban scene. From subway panhandlers to barbecue-crazed millionaires. Bogosian reveals the hidden humor, fear, hypocrisy and rage of Americans - including, for the first time, "Eric Bogosian," a hyperaggressive standup comic. With this seductive element of self-revelation, he heightens the disturbing connections between his characters and, by extension, between us and the people we try not to see - and not to be - every day.

"A born storyteller with perfect pitch." - New York Times This volume features two of Bogosian's more unsettling works. Notes from Underground charts, in diary form, the life of an urban recluse who wants desperately to be "normal" but ultimately sinks into an abyss of his own making. Scenes from the New World is a play composed of three one-acts, probing modern life on the eve of the millennium.

A collection of monologues uses characters such as a hypcritical rock star and a subway panhandler to comment on current issues, including man's vision of the world, the future, self-delusion, anxiety, and hatred.

An acerbic radio talk show host based in Dallas starts what could be an important few days when he discovers that his controversial late night show is about to be picked up by a nationwide network of radio stations. However, all is not perfect for him, because on top of troubles with his love life and fears that the management of the network will try to alter the content of his show, he has to cope with a neo-Nazi group who have been angered by his forthright opinions.

"Drinking in America" is a sequence of fourteen dramatic segments (... monologues), which together create a pastiche; a meditation on a theme. The title of the piece is a 'red herring,' for the true theme is not so much inebriation in the normal sense of the word, rather it is the inebriation and excitement of fantasy and power. The piece is meant to be performed solo and without special effects, costumes or complex mime.

Original and appropriated writings by the monologuist, performance artist, playwright, and actor. Culling from sources as varied as Hans Christian Anderson, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and William Burroughs, Bogosian throws himself into issues of masculinity, violence, and the media.

Lee Child recruits Joyce Carol Oates, Jonathan Ames, Cara Black, and others to reveal nicotine’s scintillating alter egos. 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. Inspired by the ongoing international success of the city-based Akashic Noir Series (Brooklyn Noir, Boston Noir, Paris Noir, etc.), Akashic created the Drug Chronicles Series in 2011. Following The Speed Chronicles (William T. Vollmann, Megan Abbott), The Cocaine Chronicles (Lee Child, Laura Lippman), The Heroin Chronicles (Jerry Stahl, Eric Bogosian, Lydia Lunch), and The Marijuana Chronicles (Lee Child, Joyce Carol Oates) comes The Nicotine Chronicles, masterfully curated by blockbuster hit maker Lee Child.

A masterful account of the assassins who hunted down the perpetrators of the Armenian Genocide. In 1921, a tightly knit band of killers set out to avenge the deaths of almost one million victims of the Armenian Genocide. They were a humble an accountant, a life insurance salesman, a newspaper editor, an engineering student, and a diplomat. Together they formed one of the most effective assassination squads in history. They named their operation Nemesis, after the Greek goddess of retribution. The assassins were survivors, men defined by the massive tragedy that had devastated their people. With operatives on three continents, the Nemesis team killed six major Turkish leaders in Berlin, Constantinople, Tiflis, and Rome, only to disband and suddenly disappear. The story of this secret operation has never been fully told, until now. Eric Bogosian goes beyond simply telling the story of this cadre of Armenian assassins by setting the killings in the context of Ottoman and Armenian history, as well as showing in vivid color the era's history, rife with political fighting and massacres. Casting fresh light on one of the great crimes of the twentieth century and one of history's most remarkable acts of vengeance, Bogosian draws upon years of research and newly uncovered evidence. Operation Nemesis is the result -- both a riveting read and a profound examination of evil, revenge, and the costs of violence.

This collection of heroin stories from Eric Bogosian, Jerry Stahl, Lydia Lunch, and more "will satisfy devotees of noir fiction and outsider art alike" (Publishers Weekly). On the heels of The Speed Chronicles (Sherman Alexie, William T. Vollmann, Megan Abbott, James Franco, Beth Lisick, etc.) and The Cocaine Chronicles (Lee Child, Laura Lippman, etc.) comes The Heroin Chronicles, a volume sure to frighten and delight. The literary styles of these stories are as diverse as the moral quandaries they explore. From the groundbreaking novels of William S. Burroughs to the mind-altering music of The Velvet Underground, heroin--in all its ecstasy and tragedy--has been the subject of many an underground masterpiece. Collected here are all-new short stories about the infamous drug by some of today's most celebrated and provocative writers, including Eric Bogosian, Lydia Lunch, Jerry Stahl, Nathan Larson, Ava Stander, Antonia Crane, Gary Phillips, Jervey Tervalon, John Albert, Michael Albo, Sophia Langdon, Tony O'Neill, and L.Z. Hansen