Tales of Times Square

Tales of Times Square remains the definitive account of Broadway’s inglorious era. The Great Whore of Babylon. If you weren’t there, Tales is the second best thing, and it remains the favorite book on New York for witnesses who swear by it. Bulldozed into lockstep with corporate America, Old Times Square now evokes a longing for the lost soul of New York.

Buy Josh's book TALES OF TIMES SQUARE

Tell the Truth Untill They Bleed

The source of Season 2's podcast—Tales of. . . My Dead Heroes. Back in print in a definitive edition, this critically acclaimed collection by Black Cracker author Josh Alan Friedman gets up close and personal with some of the most important and unsung figures in 20th century blues and rock 'n' roll. From celebrated names to unacknowledged architects of sound, here are music's big winners and tragic losses. The self-made, the self-serving, and the self-destructive. Friedman captures intimate insights, unearths secret histories, and shines a light on parts of the music business never before discussed.

An antidote to cultural mythologizing, Tell the Truth Until They Bleed is show business without the showbiz. After too many years out of circulation, Truth is back.

View Josh's book TELL THE TRUTH UNTIL THEY BLEED

Black Cracker

South School, 1962: The last segregated school in New York. Their teacher moonlights on The Lawrence Welk Show, the lady principal wears boxing gloves, and the student body is all-Negro . . . except for first grader Josh Friedman. Black Cracker is an autobiographical novel that turns the civil rights movement on its ear. “A memoir you can't accuse of lies." Center stage in this tour of Friedman's Long Island boyhood is a rogues' gallery that includes Bobo, precocious third-grade dropout and boy prince of the ghetto; his bumbling (and alarmingly potent) Uncle Limpy; Mumsy, the smelliest shoeshine boy in Penn Station; Mrs. O'Leary, the Irish nanny; her son, Drake, an etiquette-obsessed, switchblade-totin' clammer overwhelmed by the tides of racial progress; and the impoverished Wilshires, the bone-white, nigger-hatin'-est crackers in town. Heartbreaking and hysterically funny, Black Cracker delivers an account of the now-forgotten poor Black shantytowns of Long Island, exploring racial disharmony, the intrigue of janitorial whodunits and the seductive powers of croco-print footwear.

View Josh's book BLACK CRACKER

Other books by Josh Alan Friedman: I, Goldstein: My Screwed Life (with Al Goldstein), When Sex Was Dirty, Now Dig This: The Unspeakable Writings of Terry Soutern (co-editor, wth Nile Southern), Warts and All (with Drew Friedman), Any Similarity to Persons Living of Dead is Purely Coincidental (with Drew Friedman)