★ 11/27/2023
Former Village Voice nightlife columnist Romano debuts with a phenomenal oral history of the alternative weekly from its founding in 1955 through the 2018 shutdown of editorial operations. Drawing on more than 200 interviews with Voice personnel, Romano explores the many vibrant personalities, colorful stories, and heated disputes that defined the publication. Founding editor-in-chief Dan Wolf is remembered for championing young writers who “were actually living what byline was about,” and cultural critic Greg Tate comes across as an erudite polymath whom features editor Lisa Kennedy credits for opening up “an incredible space for people to imagine writing whatever the fuck they wanted.” There’s no shortage of drama, such as when short-tempered jazz critic Stanley Crouch punched music writer Harry Allen over Allen’s defense of hip-hop (“In the interest of talking against the promotion of thuggish behavior, I smacked him,” Crouch says). Romano is unafraid to cast a critical eye, devoting a devastating chapter to the Voice’s scant early coverage of the AIDS epidemic; editor Richard Goldstein recalls that “there was a reluctance on the part of people to do something that was so negative about sex.” Brimming with riveting anecdotes and capturing its subject’s rollicking spirit, this is a remarkable portrait of the “nation’s first alternative newspaper.” Photos. Agent: Betsy Lerner, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner. (Feb.)
[A] well-made disco ball of a book — it’s big, discursive, ardent, intellectual and flecked with gossip. “The Freaks Came Out to Write” may be the best history of a journalistic enterprise I’ve ever read.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times
“The Voice was the living center of the marginal, the weird, the rebellious. In the space and time of reading this wild ride of a book, I returned to that creative, crazy margin, and I think many other readers will, too.”—Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s “Fresh Air”
“[The Freaks Came Out to Write] reads like a night at a gossipy media party. Author Tricia Romano, a former Voice nightlife reporter, is the ideal guide through the gathering.”—The Washington Post
“[A]n animated tour of a shifting cultural landscape from critics who themselves shifted the landscape.”—The Boston Globe
"What The Freaks Came Out to Write really captures is the serious collegiality of a newspaper, the alchemy that happens when a group of people attempt to record the world, together."—The Financial Times
“The Freaks Came Out to Write is a rueful elegy for rawer, cheaper, better days.”—The Guardian
“[A] lively history of the pioneering alt-weekly.”—New York Post
“[A] triumph of contemporary journalism.”—Village Voice
“Romano debuts with a phenomenal oral history….Brimming with riveting anecdotes and capturing its subject’s rollicking spirit, this is a remarkable portrait of the “nation’s first alternative newspaper.”—Publishers Weekly
“Some writers give voice to the voiceless. Romano gives voice to the Voice. For more than six decades, the Village Voice not only had its finger on the pulse of New York, but quickened that pulse with its cultural criticism, investigative reporting, columns, cartoons, and more. I love this book!”—Questlove
“A brilliant oral history that chronicles not only the Village Voice, the most important alt-weekly of our time, but also the history of New York City during the latter half of the 20th Century. One of the best narrative oral histories I have ever read—seamlessly edited, with anarchy on almost every page.”—Gillian McCain, co-author of Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk
“An uncensored look at the freewheeling, kaleidoscope lives of the people who wrote for the Voice. This book is essential reading for anyone who cares about politics, culture, history, or democracy. Romano makes me wish I was twenty again, reading the Voice while trying to score a futon.”—Gary Shteyngart, author of author of Our Country Friends
“This book reads like a garrulous night at the bar with the most brilliant, quarrelsome, passionate, and funny writers and editors of the Golden Age of insurgent media. The gossip! The fist fights! The passion! The fury! These collective voices and tales remind us not only of what writers once did, but what they can and should do RIGHT NOW. Hallelujah.”—Joe Hagan, author of Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine
“The Village Voice gave me my start as a writer. Romano’s colorful oral history, The Freaks Came Out to Write, serves as both a personal reminder of what and who made the Voice so unique and a broader history of the coolest newspaper that ever was.”—Sloane Crosley, author of Grief Is for People
“The Voice was the greatest paper ever and Romano captures the wild energy of what it was like to be a writer there.”—Touré, Author of I Would Die 4 You: How Prince Became an Icon and host of Touré Show
"Romano makes a zesty book debut with a polyphonic oral history of the iconic Village Voice."—Kirkus
"[A]n absorbing firsthand history…readers get a real flavor of the exciting and troubling times throughout the Village Voice’s run and the opportunity to draw their own conclusions about its rise."—Library Journal
01/01/2024
When readers see the name of the NYC newspaper the Village Voice, they may instantly recall its radical and important journalistic coverage of some of the most important issues of the day, such as the Vietnam War, civil rights, the AIDS crisis, and 9/11. Romano interned and worked at the Voice for eight years. Her book is an absorbing firsthand history of the publication, recounting its history and cast of characters (from Mailer to Musto to Dash), either through their writings or the more than 200 interviews Romano conducted. Chapters about each era of the Voice are short, and there is little analysis. Instead, readers are left to interpret the vibe and meaning of those periods of Voice history. VERDICT An exceptional resource in which readers get a real flavor of the exciting and troubling times throughout the Village Voice's run and the opportunity to draw their own conclusions about its rise (and fall in 2017). Recommended for academic libraries and comprehensive journalism collections.—Maria Ashton-Stebbings
2023-10-24
A chronicle of a famed publication.
Journalist Romano makes a zesty book debut with a polyphonic oral history of the iconic Village Voice. Drawing from more than 200 interviews with writers, editors, photographers, proofreaders, interns, critics, artists, and activists, the author tells the story of the feisty newspaper, founded in 1955 by journalist Dan Wolf, psychologist Ed Fancher, and novelist Norman Mailer, to offer a forum for independent reporting. “Our philosophy,” said Richard Goldstein, who served as editor, “was you do not hire an expert; you hire someone who is living through the phenomenon worth covering.” Poets were hired as poetry critics, dancers as dance critics; Jules Feiffer became the resident cartoonist. From the outset, the Voice celebrated and encouraged personal journalism on issues that mattered to Greenwich Village and beyond, including civil rights, off-Broadway theater, jazz clubs, hip-hop, AIDS, gay activism, the women’s movement, and independent films. Former editor Joe Levy notes that it “that took things seriously—small things, developing things, emerging things—that other places didn’t.” As Yippies co-founder Jim Fouratt comments, “At its very peak—the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s—the Village Voice was the go-to place to find out what was happening in music, film, local politics, national politics, books, what was happening in the art world. The Voice had the cultural elite.” Romano’s interviewees reveal internal squabbles and rivalries, as well as changes resulting from a succession of owners: wealthy man-about-town Carter Burden, New York magazine founder Clay Felker, irascible mogul Rupert Murdoch, New Times Media, and billionaire Peter Barbey. “The Village Voice is an apocalyptic publication,” one writer opined; “every four or five years they have another apocalypse.” Now only an online publication, the Voice, Romano asserts, is evidence of a void in journalism created by “greedy, imperious, and/or incompetent and negligent management.”
Eyewitness testimony makes for a vibrant media history.
[A] well-made disco ball of a book…[that] may be the best history of a journalistic enterprise I’ve ever read.”
[A] lively history of the pioneering alt-weekly.”
Captures…the serious collegiality of a newspaper, the alchemy that happens when a group of people attempt to record the world, together.”
A rueful elegy for rawer, cheaper, better days.”
