The Freaks Came Out to Write

Finalist for 2024 National Book Critics Circle Awards: Nonfiction

“[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.”
 

“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.”

“[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.”

“[A]n animated tour of a shifting cultural landscape from critics who themselves shifted the landscape.”

"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 Freaks Came Out to Write is a rueful elegy for rawer, cheaper, better days.”

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“[A] lively history of the pioneering alt-weekly.”

“[A] triumph of contemporary journalism.”

“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.'”

“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!”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The Voice was the greatest paper ever and Romano captures the wild energy of what it was like to be a writer there.”

"Romano makes a zesty book debut with a polyphonic oral history of the iconic Village Voice."

"[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."

"A delicious oral history…[The Freaks Came out to Write] sounds uncannily like the paper itself as it was experienced throughout its glory years and the years after."

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