Reading Norman Mailer’s Tough Guys Don’t Dance reminds me of a stint I did once as a custodian at a mental hospital. Occasionally, I had to clean up something on the admitting ward, where the schizophrenics and manic depressives had just been pulled off the street in full psychosis, before they’d been drugged into the sad, silent state that is the primary goal of mental health facilities. Continue reading Tough Guys Don’t Dance: Norman Mailer vs. the People’s Prick
Tag: fiction for men
Above the Saints & Angels
A Short Story
by Arnold Snyder
Detroit had three burlesque theaters in the 1960s, all of them downtown—the National, the Stone, and the Empress. Rudy and I had been watching their ads on the movie guide page of the Detroit News for as many years as we could remember. We discussed what we thought might go on in these places. The only thing we knew for sure was that there were women who would take their clothes off. Exactly how much they took off was a topic of endless speculation. Continue reading Above the Saints & Angels
A Short Story
Hack Writing 101: The Lost Meat Spear Manuscript
My Brief Career Writing Porn Novels for Greenleaf Classics
It’s a dirty story
of a dirty man
— “Paperback Writer,” 1966 (Lennon-McCartney)
I started my writing career in the early 70s, writing primarily fiction—pseudonymous and anonymous two-cents-a-word stuff. Mostly, I wrote porn novels, but also short stories for the women’s romance/confession mags—“My Husband Ran Off with the Babysitter”—that sort of stuff, and occasionally short stories for the cheapo men’s mags. Continue reading Hack Writing 101: The Lost Meat Spear Manuscript