“Terry Southern was one of the first and best of the new wave of American writers, defining the cutting edge of black comedy.”—Joseph Heller
Open Road Media announces the publication of Terry Southern’s Red-Dirt Marijuana and Other Tastes on June 14, 2011. It joins five other Terry Southern titles previously made available as ebooks in May, including Blue Movie, Flash and Filigree, Candy, The Magic Christian, and Texas Summer.
An underground classic, Red-Dirt Marijuana and Other Tastes is a brilliant collection of incisive, darkly comic, devastating stories and wide-ranging pieces by America’s master satirist. It includes journalism, parodies and theatrical sketches, short riffs, and Southern’s most definitive early works of fiction. “Red-Dirt Marijuana,” the insightful story of the relationship between a white boy and a black man, is paired with the horrific drag-out of “Razor Fight.” There is an imaginary encounter between Freud and Kafka in “Apartment to Exchange,” a skewering of the liberal white man and his efforts to befriend a black jazz musician in “You’re Too Hip, Baby,” an exploration of race relations, moonshine, and the baton-twirling subculture in the personal essay “Twirling at Ole Miss” (identified by Tom Wolfe as the first instance of “New Journalism”), and “The Blood of a Wig,” which still ranks as one of the most scandalous stories ever published. Red-Dirt Marijuana and Other Tastes is a wild, funny, and dazzlingly diverse trip through the American culture of the 1950s and 1960s.
Terry Southern (1924–1995), an American satirist, author, journalist, screenwriter, and educator, is considered one of the great literary minds of the second half of the twentieth century. His bestselling novels—Candy, a spoof on pornography based on Voltaire’s Candide, and The Magic Christian, a satire of the grossly rich—established Southern as a literary and pop culture icon. His successful film career included the Academy Award–nominated screenplays for Dr. Strangelove and Easy Rider. In later years, Southern wrote for Saturday Night Live and lectured on screenwriting at NYU and Columbia University.
Newly developed content from Open Road includes fresh covers and an illustrated biography complete with rare photos from the author’s archival collection, as well as videos featuring interviews with his son, Nile Southern, author Fran Lebowitz, and Paris Review Southern Editor John Jeremiah Sullivan.
Extra content includes:
- Review copies via NetGalley
- Illustrated biography in each ebook, including rare photographs and documents from Southern’s archive illuminating his life and distinguished career
- Behind-the-scenes commentary and videos on Open Road’s Terry Southern Author Page
