Jerry Stahl, John Veit, and Scot Sothern at These Days (Los Angeles)
October 24, 4:00–6:00 PM PT • Los Angeles, CA: These Days | 118 Winston St., 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, CA 90013
Join ZE Books at These Days, the downtown Los Angeles gallery and bookshop, for an afternoon of pictures and readings. John Veit presents a slideshow and talk from his new book, Botanical Apartheid: Impacts of Drug Wars on Politics, Culture and the Environment; Jerry Stahl reads from Gonzo Neurotic: The Best (and Not So Best) of Jerry Stahl; and the writer and photographer Scot Sothern reads as well.
Long before descending into the underworld of addiction in Permanent Midnight—the memoir, and later film, that made him famous—Jerry Stahl had built a singular career reporting from America’s psychic gutters and cultural sideshows. Ricocheting from porn sets, televangelists, undertaker conventions, recovery culture, and all manner of Hollywood grotesquerie, he fearlessly explored the darker territory of heroin, fatherhood, Jewish identity, and survival.
In Gonzo Neurotic, Stahl brings together the New Journalism that shaped his voice, interlaced with his own wild-ass commentary on his youthful lunacy and catastrophic life choices. Spanning the 1970s to the 2020s, the book takes readers from the “wet heart of Pageantland” at the Miss America contest to the twisted realms of post-nuclear cult erotica, to the TV show ALF, and to the extremes of midnight moviedom, alongside profiles of Marlon Brando, Samuel L. Jackson, and Benicio del Toro.
About the Author
Jerry Stahl is the author of eleven books, including the best-selling novel I, Fatty and the narcotic memoir Permanent Midnight, made into a movie 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, and The New York Times, and his screen credits include Maron, ALF, Twin Peaks, and Showtime’s Escape at Dannemora, for which he received an Emmy nomination.
Also Appearing
John Veit is a longtime High Times columnist who reported for the magazine on medical-marijuana law and the hemp movement in the 1990s. His new book, Botanical Apartheid: Impacts of Drug Wars on Politics, Culture and the Environment, examines what the war on drugs has done to politics, culture, and the land. He lives in Ojai, California.
Scot Sothern is a writer and photographer born in the Missouri Ozarks and based in Los Angeles. He is best known for Lowlife, his black-and-white photographs and stories of street prostitution in Southern California in the late 1980s, which the British Journal of Photography called the year’s most controversial photobook. His other books include the memoir Curb Service, Streetwalkers, the novel BigCity, and Look at Me, and he wrote the columns Sothern Exposure and Nocturnal Submissions for Vice. He has had two solo shows at These Days.
About the Venue
These Days is a gallery, bookshop, and publisher in the Historic Core of downtown Los Angeles, run by Stephen and Jodi Zeigler, Los Angeles natives and longtime downtown residents. Its exhibitions lean toward creative rebellion and nonconformist culture—Nick Waplington’s paintings, a show of artifacts from the punk band X—and the shop stocks new and out-of-print art and photography books and zines. thesedaysla.com
“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