Out of many, one: Tricia Romano captures the brilliant gestalt of the ‘Village Voice.’
On this week’s Fully Booked podcast, Tricia Romano discusses The Freaks Came Out To Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture (PublicAffairs, Feb. 27), an enthralling oral history of the country’s first (and best) alternative weekly newspaper. Former staffer Romano, who began as an intern in 1997 and became an award-winning contributing writer and nightlife columnist, draws from more than 200 interviews with fellow writers, editors, photographers, cartoonists, proofreaders, critics, columnists, politicians, and activists, offering a sonorous history of the trailblazing paper founded in 1955 by Dan Wolf, Ed Fancher, and Normal Mailer.
Here’s a bit more from our review of The Freaks Came Out To Write: “‘Our philosophy,’ said Richard Goldstein, who served as editor, ‘was you do not hire an expert; you hire someone who is living through the phenomenon worth covering.’ Poets were hired as poetry critics, dancers as dance critics; Jules Feiffer became the resident cartoonist. From the outset, the Voice celebrated and encouraged personal journalism on issues that mattered to Greenwich Village and beyond, including civil rights, off-Broadway theater, jazz clubs, hip-hop, AIDS, gay activism, the women’s movement, and independent films.…Romano’s interviewees reveal internal squabbles and rivalries, as well as changes resulting from a succession of owners: wealthy man-about-town Carter Burden, New York magazine founder Clay Felker, irascible mogul Rupert Murdoch, New Times Media, and billionaire Peter Barbey.…Eyewitness testimony makes for a vibrant media history.”
Romano discloses that she got the title for the book from longtime Village Voice critic Greg Tate, whose brilliant career influenced countless critics. We then discuss why oral history was the right away to tell this story; how Romano found her way to the Voice in 1997, and the shape her career took over the next eight years; some differences in approach between the Voice and the New York Times; the Voice’sfounding in 1955, the major players and the cause that united them, and whether there was a time in 20th-century American history when the pen was indeed mightier than the sword. We touch on the common refrain by which Voice editors answered calls of You need to be writing about this (i.e., Then you do it); the career of cartoonist Jules Feiffer; whether Romano believes there was a golden age of the Voice; how publishers produced an audiobook featuring 200+ voices; and much more.
Then editors Laura Simeon, Mahnaz Dar, Eric Liebetrau, and Laurie Muchnick share their top picks in books for the week.
EDITORS’ PICKS:
Bunt!: Striking Out on Financial Aid by Ngozi Ukazu, illus. by Mad Rupert, color by K Czap (First Second)
The Partition Project by Saadia Faruqi (Quill Tree Books/HarperCollins)
3 Shades of Blues: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool by James Kaplan (Penguin Press)
Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez (Flatiron Books)
ALSO MENTIONED ON THIS EPISODE:
The Check, Please! series by Ngozi Ukazu
Stealing Green Mangoes: Two Brothers, Two Fates, One Indian Childhood by Sunil Dutta
Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo
THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS:
Forgetting Me by Katherine Tirado-Ryen
The Starflower by K.A. Kenny
Finding Miss Fong by James A. Wolter
Reasonable by K.T. Carlisle
Arctic Revelation: A Thousand Lifetimes in the Blink of an Eye by Hugh Finch
Fully Booked is produced by Cabel Adkins Audio and Megan Labrise.
