The KGB Bar Nonfiction Reader

Mark Jacobson and Denis Woychuk
October 2004     ISBN: 156025601X

The iconic KGB Bar on New York's Lower East Side is home to America's most diverse and exciting series of nonfiction literary readings. Over the years, luminaries such as Jimmy Breslin, Budd Schulberg, David Remnick, Jack Newfield, Natalie Angier, Joyce Carol Oates, Susan Orlean, Luc Sante and many others have held forth before awestruck, if bleary-eyed, audiences at the bar.

The KGB Bar Nonfiction Reader reflects the mix-and-match, whiplash mood-swing atmosphere of the series's best evenings, arranged thematically around topics such as "Sex, Politics, and the Ineffable," "East Side, West Side, Weird Side," and "Lo, Cultureland!"

This diverse collection includes country singer and rabble-rouser Steve Earle's moving eyewitness account of a Texas execution, Fab 5 Freddy's remarkable essay on the role of American hip-hop in Brazil's slums and prisons, a treatise on freight train-hopping by Lucius Shepard, Budd Schulberg on the making of On the Waterfront, and Pulitzer Prize winner Mike Wallace on New York City's draft riots.

Mark Jacobson, a k a Commandante Sub-Zero, a critically acclaimed novelist and journalist, is the founder and main curator of the reading series, which he founded in his Brooklyn living room in 1992. After moving to a hair salon, bowling alley and several coffee shops, the series found a permanent home at the KGB Bar.

Denis Woychuk, owner/impresario of the KGB Bar, is the series editor of KGB Reader books. He lives in New York City, where he drinks for free.