The Freaks Came Out to Write

A rollicking history of America’s most iconic weekly newspaper told through the voices of its legendary writers, editors, and photographers “The Freaks Came Out to Write may be the best history of a journalistic enterprise I’ve ever read”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times You either were there or you wanted to be. A defining New York City institution co-founded by Norman Mailer, The Village Voice was the first newspaper to cover hip-hop, the avant-garde art scene, and Off-Broadway with gravitas. It reported on the AIDS crisis with urgency and seriousness when other papers dismissed it as a gay disease. In 1979, the Voice’s Wayne Barrett uncovered Donald Trump as a corrupt con artist before anyone else was paying attention. It invented new forms of criticism and storytelling and revolutionized journalism, spawning hundreds of copycats.