People keep saying to me, "I read some excerpts from your book on your website." I'd like to point out that there aren't any excerpts from my book on my website, or if there are they are buried deep in the archives and represent very rough drafts. I think what people are probably referring to is my commentary from the Republican Convention. But none of that is actually in the book. My publisher didn't want me posting sections of the book online because they thought it would hurt sales. But the good news is Looking Forward To It is dirt cheap, paperback orginal, only $14.
I'll be heading to Ohio tomorrow. See if we can't register a few thousand voters there and get them to the polls. Wish us luck. Also, I think it's strange that Dick Cheney is still going around linking Iraq with Al Qaeda. I really do. I think it's about the strangest thing in the world.
"Any true love story, if told with the urgency and animal intelligence of love, isn't for the fainthearted. On every page of this profound, distilled work of art, Stephen Elliott wrestles with the unknown and unspoken essences of love, and articulates that unknown so beautifully, with such clear-eyed fearlessness... Imagine a glass of pure water with one drop of blood hanging in its center, about to dissolve... Then drink it and be transformed." -Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City
"There's an emotional courage to these stories, and a sense of urgency, that are thrilling to encounter. Elliott writes as if his life depended on each sentence. It is not overstating the case to say that he does for the BDSM community in this book what Denis Johnson did for lost druggies in Jesus' Son." - Steve Almond, The Believer Magazine
Best of the year: Salon.com, San Francisco Chronicle
"Happy Baby is surely the most intelligent and beautiful book ever written about juvenile detention centers, sadomasochism, and drugs." - Curtis Sittenfeld, The New York Times Book Review
"Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer, Richard Ben Cramer: the great, all-American genre of the political campaign in extenso (and in extremis) has had its Homers and Boswells. To that list we can now add Stephen Elliott. Hilarious, strange, electrifyingly written, and heart-pumpingly idealistic, Looking Forward to It wins every literary caucus and primary in a landslide." -Tom Bissell, author of Chasing the Sea
"A Life Without Consequences was harrowing, hard as nails, brutal, and soaring. Stephen Elliott has to be watched, because he knows things almost no one else could." - Dave Eggers, author of A Heart Breaking Work of Staggering Genius and What Is The What