The Playboy Nightstand

Who’s To Say What’s Obscene?: Politics, Culture and Comedy in America Today
By Paul Krassner (City Lights Publishers)
Krassner lives in a world where Truth and Satire are swingers, changing partners so often you never know who belongs with whom. His latest collection of entertaining essays, which originally appeared in publications as diverse as High Times, The Nation, Adult Video News Online and the Huffington Post (Arianna Huffington wrote the introduction), covers comedy, the drug war, the counterculture, dead icons and freedom. Don’t miss the parts they left out of the Borat movie, the short history of racism in standup and the discussion of whether Moses might have been tripping when he parted the Red Sea.

A Treasury of XXth Century Murder: Famous Players
By Rick Geary (Comics Lit)
Read any of the cartoonist’s true-crime graphic novels and you’ll be hooked. Geary has reported and retold the stories of Jack the Ripper, Lizzie Borden, the Lindbergh kidnapping and other, more obscure crimes of the century. His best book may be The Saga of the Bloody Benders, the true story a family who set up shop along the Osage Trail in southern Kansas in 1870 shortly before travelers began to disappear. (Their methods were ingenious.) Or perhaps it's The Beast of Chicago: The Murderous Career of H.H. Holmes which is a graphic treatment of one of American history's lowest and highest points: the country's first serial killer operating in the shadows of the wildly successful Columbian Exposition. Or it may even be Famous Players—his re-creation of the 1922 whodunit surrounding William Desmond Taylor, a Hollywood director found shot to death in his home. Which is Geary's best book? You decide.




A.D: New Orleans After the Deluge
By Josh Neufeld (Pantheon)
A project nearly three years in the making, this documentary graphic novel by a longtime American Splendor contributing artist began as a serial webcomic. Following the tales of six real-life New Orleans natives during Hurricane Katrina, the narrative takes a journalistic approach and encourages readers to confront the issues arising from the tragedy in terms of individuals who confronted and often overcame them. Because Neufeld added story and art to this transition to print, even fans of the webcomic will enjoy this entirely new incarnation of a work of art that Cornel West has called as “seismic in its scope.”


Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo
By Werner Herzog (Ecco)
Herzog, one of Germany’s greatest filmmakers, worked from 1979 to 1981 in the rainforests of Peru to make a movie about a rubber baron’s effort to conquer the jungle. The resulting film, Fitzcarraldo, centers on Herzog’s hauling of a 320-ton steamship over a hill. But there is surprisingly little to be found here about the film. The book is instead an elegant meditation on the cruelty of nature and the folly of human aspirations. Herzog writes as a dispassionate naturalist, and his notes are filled with tarantulas, snakes and butterflies. Conquest is concerned primarily with processes of growth and decay, and with the mindless fecundity of the Amazonian jungle. The true savages here are not the Indians, but actors like Jason Robards and Klaus Kinski (who the Indians—annoyed by his antics—offered to kill for Herzog). Everything is compromised, broken and rotting. Herzog appears to be the sole voice of sanity, until you realize he is no more sane than his subjects.

Nobody Move
By Denis Johnson (FSG)
If you missed this neo-noir originally published in our pages, in installments a la Dickens, it might be a chilling solution to August’s dog days. From its opening scenes to its startling conclusion, this is a work as grisly as it is antic, as much a tribute to noir as it is an updating of the genre’s possibilities. It maps a colliding and eliding of characters and agendas: a hapless gambler and sometimes barbershop singer trying to survive, a femme fatale with $2.3 million and her dignity to recover, a gangster lousy with vengeance fantasies, and a leggy nurse and Desert Storm vet looking for her own payday. It is a fast, circuitous and sometimes outrageous ride and among the most potent reminders of all that fiction can do.