Rare Bird Books A Barnacle Book imprint: 47 books

Walter Braum is pregnant with his own twin brother and, frankly, he’s having one hell of a time figuring out how to tell people about it. The forty pounds he thought he had accrued by gracelessly compromising his way through life is actually a human being he has unwittingly carried thirty-five years...

In the highly personal tradition of Jenny Offill and Elena Ferrante, Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride is loosely based on Sweany's tragicomedic teenage life growing up in Indiana and his later years working in the New York publishing industry. Hunter S. Thompson biographer William McKeen called it, “Fear...

Do you ever look forward to what life will be like once you are dead? Functioning as a double-rainbow bridge connecting the ordinary now with the stack of memories that create the past and the netherworld ahead, Now That I Am Gone is the memoir of an everyman’s existence as it goes on without...

Far from bitter or self-pitying, Rock Monster is an honest account of one woman’s life-changing experience in a relationship with rock legend Joe Walsh. At once envious, glamorous, debauched and disturbing, it’s her long and winding journey from life in the fast lane to sobriety and redemption. Set...

A no-holds-barred memoir of legendary Dead Kennedys and Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer D.H. Peligro, Dreadnaught chronicles Peligro from his pre-DK years growing up in a deprived St. Louis ghetto to San Francisco with Jello Biafra, East Bay Ray, and Klaus Flouride-from Los Angeles with the Chili Peppers...

Jerry Stahl's seminal memoir of drug addiction and a career in Hollywood, Permanent Midnight is a classic along the lines of Hubert Selby, Jr.'s Last Exit to Brooklyn. Illuminating the self-loathing and self-destruction of an addict's inner life, Permanent Midnight follows Stahl through the dregs of...

Proclaimed "girl-pervert" Oriana Small, AKA Ashley Blue, a veritable artist at heart, weaves through the intricacies of a decade in and out of the adult film industry, love, drugs, and her own firebrand of what it means to live ecstatically. From accolades to agony, Girlvert illuminates the surreality of a life lived beyond all comprehension.

In twenty heavy chapters, this book chronicles Anselmi's experiences growing up as a straight edge, BMX-riding metal head in Rock Springs, Wyoming, a place with one of the highest per capita suicide rates in the United States. His grandpa was a well-known businessman and politician in the area, and was...

Bad Sex On Speed is a savage, careening, hyper-real nightmare of a novel, taking us to the depths of Amphetamine America. Told with no concession to traditional narrative, in the voices of those in the grips and on the fringes, the stories that emerge are at once devastating, hysterical, and-perhaps...

I will fly at last. I will unfold my wings. I will unpack my head. I will step back outside. One day I may even make love again. But one thing at a time. Let's not get ahead of ourselves. Film mogul, aviator, addict, inventor, visionary, recluse, serial womanizer, and political meddler: Howard Hughes...

Burn My Shadow follows the porn career of Tyler Knight, a black porn star who stars mainly in porn for couples. A star that breaks all stereotypes and barriers, Knight's story is one of race and sexuality that pushes the boundaries of what is thought of porn and porn stars. Tyler Knight is a one of a kind star, and this is his story.

Take Fountain is a "found pages" meta-novel that, through transcripts of an interview between a screenwriter and a script-reading superstar, unravels a murder mystery with profound implications. A novel along the lines of Padgett Powell's You & Me, Take Fountain uses the format of interview transcript...

"I was taken most seriously when listening to men listen to themselves.”When Leda Galvan, a gifted writer who can also occasionally be given to self-destruction, gets in to the school of her dreams and sets out to make a new life in Austin, she soon discovers that the heaviest baggage cannot always...

Set in Los Angeles and its dying adult film industry, real-life porn star and cam model, Danny Wylde, recounts the end of his career in equal parts fact and fiction. He bears his last months amid the death of a friend, a client's dangerous fantasy, a secret boyfriend, and a family bent on destroying...