Lived It, Survived It, Wrote a Book About It: Brian Cullman and Jerry Stahl (Miami)
November 22, 4:30 PM ET • Miami, FL: Miami Book Fair, Miami Dade College | Building 8, Second Floor, Room 8201 | 300 NE Second Avenue
Join ZE Books at Miami Book Fair, where Brian Cullman and Jerry Stahl talk with Michael Stock of WLRN about writing a life you only half survived, and about what the music, the magazines, and the bad decisions sounded like at the time.
How to Prepare For The Past: Travels In Music and Time is Brian Cullman's rapturous evocation of life in the bike lane, before the world was digital, when music was everything and magic was everywhere. It moves between New York, London, Tangier, and points further out, gathering encounters with Nick Drake, Sandy Denny, Big Joe Turner, Lester Bangs, Paul Bowles, and the Master Musicians of Jajouka. "When people asked me my favorite song," Cullman writes, "I would just say the radio."
Gonzo Neurotic: The Best (and Not So Best) of Jerry Stahl gathers fifty years of sex, drugs, show business, and bad behavior from the laureate of American excess. Long before Permanent Midnight made him famous, Stahl was reporting from the country's psychic gutters and cultural sideshows — porn sets, televangelists, undertaker conventions, the ALF writers' room — and much of that work had been buried in the lost world of alt-weeklies and pre-internet magazines. Dwight Garner, reviewing it in The New York Times Book Review, called Stahl "his own vivid comic invention."
Both writers have spent their careers close to the music and a long way from the press release. Expect the conversation to go where the books go.
About Brian Cullman
Brian Cullman is a writer and musician based in New York and in France. He has written extensively for The Paris Review, Antaeus, Rolling Stone, and The Village Voice, and has won the ASCAP/Deems Taylor award for excellence in music journalism three times. He has three solo albums on Sunnyside and is currently a member of the Lisbon-based group Rua Das Pretas.
About Jerry Stahl
Jerry Stahl is the author of eleven books, including the bestselling novel I, Fatty and the narcotic memoir Permanent Midnight, made into a film starring Ben Stiller. Nein, Nein, Nein!: One Man's Tale of Depression, Psychic Torment, and a Bus Tour of the Holocaust was named one of Kirkus Reviews' 100 Best Nonfiction Books of 2022. His journalism and fiction have appeared in Esquire, The Believer, VICE, The New York Times, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology, and his screen work includes ALF, Twin Peaks, Maron, the cult classic Café Flesh, and Showtime's Escape at Dannemora, for which he received an Emmy nomination. A new novel, Bad Sex in the Afterlife, will be published by Arcade in early 2027.
About the Moderator
Michael Stock has hosted Folk and Acoustic Music on WLRN, South Florida's public radio station, for more than four decades — a weekly three-hour program covering traditional and contemporary folk along with acoustic music from around the world, blues, gospel, western swing, and protest music. He began as a folk DJ at WMNF in Tampa before taking over the folk program at WLRN, promoted concerts around South Florida in the late 1970s, and ran a folk nightclub, the Deco Gecko, at the Shelborne Hotel. He works with the South Florida Folk Club and the Broward Folk Club, and he has been named to the Folk Radio Hall of Fame for what the Hall described as a "deep commitment to building and sustaining a folk music community in South Florida."
About the Venue
Miami Book Fair has run every November since 1984 and is the largest and longest-running literary festival in the country. It takes over the Wolfson Campus of Miami Dade College in downtown Miami: hundreds of authors across classrooms, conference rooms, and outdoor stages, a street fair of publishers and booksellers filling the surrounding blocks, and programming in English, Spanish, and Creole. Street Fair weekend runs November 20–22 this year. The fair also runs readings, workshops, and programs for writers and young readers all year round, and Books & Books — Mitchell Kaplan's Coral Gables institution — is its bookseller. miamibookfair.com
Writer and musician Brian Cullman’s rapturous evocation of life in the bike lane, before the world was digital, when music was everything and magic was everywhere, encompassing friendships with Lester Bangs, Nick Drake, Big Joe Turner, Tim Hardin, and Paul Bowles.
Release: Apr 28, 2026
Paperback ISBN: 9798988670100 • 256 pages
UK release: Jun 11, 2026 • UK Price: £14.99
“Jerry Stahl should either get the Pulitzer prize or be shot down in the street like a dog.”
—Anthony Bourdain
“[A] career-spanning collection . . . Stahl is funny, self-aware and very much in on his own ‘professional ex-junkie’ act . . . But he’s a more sober observer than he lets on . . . Stahl is his own vivid comic invention. Life whooshes past him like arrows, and some of those arrows stick in his guts.”
—Dwight Garner, The New York Times Book Review
Fifty years of sex, drugs, show business, and bad behavior from the inimitable laureate of American excess, Jerry Stahl.
Release: Sep 29, 2026
Paperback ISBN: 9798988670186 • 456 pages
UK release: Nov 5, 2026 • UK Price: £14.99