"Desperate, degrading, wise, witty, these tales of addiction encompass family struggles, failed relationships, dirty sex, overdoses, and the constant drive for drugs that fuels each vein-digging author. Dispelling myths about the glamour of self-destruction, Stahl has chosen stories that are raw and real, focusing on the often bleak hopelessness of addiction, a life lived day to day with the next high as the only real motivator. And though Stahl is secretive about how many of his contributors are clean, still using, or in recovery, each narrative demonstrates a remarkable self-awareness, a revealing tone that allows readers to relate to addiction, even if they have never picked up a needle themselves." --Interview Magazine Inspired by the ongoing international success of the city-based Akashic Noir Series (Brooklyn Noir, Boston Noir, Paris Noir, etc.), Akashic created the Drug Chronicles Series. On the heels of The Speed Chronicles (Sherman Alexie, William T. Vollmann, Megan Abbott, James Franco, Beth Lisick, Tao Lin, etc.) and The Cocaine Chronicles (Lee Child, Laura Lippman, etc.) comes The Heroin Chronicles, a volume sure to frighten and delight. The literary styles are varied, as are the moral quandaries herein. Heroin has long been understood as the most "literary" of narcotics, and this collection will, for better and worse, have tremendous pop cultural appeal.

Featuring interviews with Chris Hardwick on The Nerdist Podcast and Marc Maron on WTF with Marc Maron Bad Sex On Speed is a savage, careening, hyper-real nightmare of a novel, taking us to the depths of Amphetamine America. Told with no concession to traditional narrative, in the voices of those in the grips and on the fringes, the stories that emerge are at once devastating, hysterical, and--perhaps most terrifying of all--going on all around you, all the time. Stahl digs deep into the psyche of the most demented and dispossessed among us, returning with a vision so unsparing that those not prepared to experience the screaming depths of speed psychosis up close and on the page should back slowly away and return to their lives unscathed.

Set in 1970, in the last, dark days of hippiedom, Perv -- A Love Story is the saga of Bobby Stark, a sixteen-year-old batch of desire and angst struggling to stay sane in a world gone Day-Glo. As the novel opens, Bobby loses his virginity in a drug-addled tryst with a one-armed barber's daughter. For his sins he's thrown out of school and dispatched to live with his mom, a festive electro shock aficionado, whose condo he flees to track down Michelle, the gorgeously damaged, lasped Hare Krishna-ette he's adored since kindergarten. Like the rest of their generation, the couple hit the road for California, only to be picked up in a hell-fueled Lincoln by a pair of Bad Hippies -- Meat and Varnish -- smacked-out spiritual cousins to Charles Manson. From here the trip gets vicious.... Already an underground classic, Perv-A Love Story is relentlessly twisted, sexy, and savagely funny literary excursion, a novel of doomed youth in the era when Flower Power had begun to wilt.