HOME | Mike Sager

Temple of Doom

And Other Stories of Kids and Crime

Temple of Doom: And Other Stories of Kids and Crime, by the award-winning journalist Mike Sager, is a pocket collection of true stories that shed light on the incredible intersection between underage children and adult crimes and punishments.

Fame is a Whore on Butt Row

The Tom Byron Story

In a career that spanned four different decades over 34 years, Tom Byron appeared in nearly 2,900 Triple X-rated porn films, making him the most credited actor in the Internet Adult Film Database. According to Tom’s count, he’s made a full three thousand. During that span, he had sex on film with an estimated 4,000 women. The Adult Video News, the bible of the porn industry, places Byron at number 21 of its “Top Fifty Stars of All Time.”

A Boy and His Dog in Hell

& Other True Stories

A Boy and His Dog in Hell collects 19 stories that Sager—a best-selling author and veteran of the Washington Post, Rolling Stone, and Esquire—calls “my milestones, pieces that have defined and distinguished my work over forty-some years of journalism—adventures, high jinks, near-death moments, and wrenching intimate encounters that have helped to shape me as a writer and as a man.”

The Pope of Pot

And Other True Stories of Marijuana and Related High Jinks

The Pope of Pot: And Other True Stories of Marijuana and Related High Jinks is a pocket collection, by former Rolling Stone drugs correspondent Mike Sager, highlighting his dispatches from the cannabis underground. Including a three-part chronicle of Sager's time with his gonzo predecessor, Hunter S. Thompson.

The Rise and Fall of a Super Freak

And Other True Stories of Black Men Who Made History

A pocket collection highlighting Black men whose lives significantly affected the direction and zeitgeist of the American cultural mainstream over the past half century. Including Rick James, Rodney G. King, Eric "Eazy-E" Wright, and Freeway Ricky Ross.

Hunting Marlon Brando

A True Story

At first it seemed like just another exotic assignment: “Go to Tahiti and find Marlon Brando.” But the worldwide search for the legendary actor, star of The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, and On the Waterfront, soon became a quest, and finally an obsession.

Shaman

The Mysterious Life and Impeccable Death of Carlos Castaneda

“Mike Sager is a consummate journalistic investigator and poetic chronicler of our world. Shaman is an epic study of the history of metaphysical and psychedelic thinking, personal obsession, the cult-impulse, and the mysterious life and times of Carlos Castenada himself. It’s a rare trip across a key strand of counterculture history, and a deep look at an eternally enigmatic and impactful figure whose work continues to turn the wheel of our collective unconscious.” –John Schoenfelder, co-founder, NeoText

Janet's World

The Inside Story of Washington Post Pulitzer Fabulist Janet Cooke

“Janet Cooke was a warning shot, a harbinger of all kinds of journalistic scandals to come.” —Howard Kurtz, author and media critic

Vetville

True Stories of the U.S. Marines at War and at Home

“Entertaining and fascinating. It draws the reader into these lives; at the end of the book, you will find yourself changed in some way… You will remember these men that you read about long after putting this book to rest.” FIVE STARS.–Military Writers Society of America*

The Lonely Hedonist

True Stories of Sex, Drugs, Dinosaurs and Peter Dinklage

“For four decades, Mike Sager has been one of our finest practitioners of feature magazine writing, picking up where the New Journalism Gods—Wolfe, Talese, Thompson, et al—left off. This latest trove of Sager’s irresistible brand of social anthropology shows him in peak form, whether writing about celebrities, like J.J. Abrams and Peter Dinklage, or the usual gathering of bonafide American originals that find their way into his stories—a family-owned sex toys factory, a weed doctor, a clown, a man who started an exclusive sex club in Beverly Hills, and more.”–Alex Belth, Editor, EsquireClassic.com

Stoned Again

The High Times and Strange Life of a Drugs Correspondent

“In Stoned Again, Mike Sager refers to himself as a ‘drugs correspondent,’ but that’s legitimately humble smoke that belies what’s really going on here. While there’s plenty of weed, heroin, shrooms, and crack (not to mention plenty of Rick James, bitch) in these pages, what is most evident on every page is the remarkable reporting, empathy, craftsmanship, and storytelling that have rightly placed Mike Sager among the journalistic legends of our time.”–Maximillian Potter, author, Shadows in the Vineyard

The Devil and John Holmes

And Other True Stories of Drugs, Porn and Murder

“The Devil and John Holmes has everything you could want in a magazine story: Sex, drugs, murder. A fourteen-inch penis. It had to be great. There was no other way. But here’s the secret. For all the freebasing and the blood, the satin bikini briefs and decorative human skulls, the porn and the binges and the deathbed confessions, The Devil and John Holmes is a love story. At least it is in Sager’s hands.”–Max Linsky, founding editor of Longform.org

High Tolerance

A Novel of Sex, Race, Celebrity, Murder… and Marijuana

“The wry and knowing Mike Sager has written a saucy and kinetic L.A. novel. Celebrity gets fully toasted in this engaging romp about show business and the clash of cultures high and low, where the talk is tough before the shooting starts. The spotlight, it seems, can sometimes be a very dark place.”–Ron Carlson, author, Return to Oakpine, co-director, MFA Program in Fiction Writing, University of California, Irvine.

The Someone You’re Not

True Stories of Sports, Celebrity, Politics & Pornography

“Mike Sager writes with uncommon grace and, always, with respect for those who give him their time. His stories cut to the bone of our common humanity.”–Paul Hendrickson, author of Seminary and Hemingway’s Boat

Next Wave

America’s New Generation of Great Literary Journalists

EDITED BY WALT HARRINGTON & MIKE SAGER
NEXT WAVE collects the work of today’s finest young writers– nineteen creative reporters whose work builds upon foundations laid by previous generations, dating back more than fifty years to John Hersey, Lillian Ross, Gay Talese, and Tom Wolfe. Naysayers predicted the decline of long-form journalism with the rise of the Internet. But NEXT WAVE is evidence that literary journalism is alive and well, and that artful craftsmanship will never go out of fashion. Each chapter includes a bio, personal essay, and an outstanding magazine or newspaper story from a different up-and-coming writer.

Revenge of the Donut Boys

True Stories of Lust, Fame, Survival and Multiple Personality

“Like his journalistic precursors Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson, Sager writes frenetic, off-kilter pop-sociological profiles of Americans in all their vulgarity and vitality. He writes with flair, but only in the service of an omnivorous curiosity. He defies expectations in pieces that lesser writers would play for satire or sensationalism… a Whitmanesque ode to teeming humanity’s mystical unity.”–The New York Times Book Review

Scary Monsters and Super Freaks

Stories of Sex, Drugs, Rock ‘N’ Roll and Murder

“I can recognize the truth in these Sager stories– demoralizing tales about the darkest possible side of wretched humanity.”–Hunter S. Thompson, author, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Deviant Behavior

A Novel

“Sager studs his dark D.C. tale with sharp observations and an addictive neo-noir sensibility.”– Publishers Weekly

Tattoos & Tequila

To Hell and Back with One of Rock's Most Notorious Frontmen

“Tattoos & Tequila the book (there’s an album of the same name) is compelling, not only because it contains many disgustingly fascinating details of how teenage boys behave when they become rock stars, but also because of its subject’s willingness to appear, well, the way he is.”– New York Magazine