The Lonely Hedonist

“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.” —Alex Belth, Editor, EsquireClassic.com

Bestselling author Mike Sager has been called “the Beat poet of American journalism, that rare reporter who can make literature out of shabby reality.” The Lonely Hedonist: True Stories of Sex, Drugs Dinosaurs and Peter Dinklage is Sager’s sixth collection of true stories–sixteen intimate profiles of larger-than-life Americans both famous and obscure:

 The founder of a Beverly Hills Sex Club who has everything he ever wanted but misses his old life. The most amazing dinosaur fossil ever found—and never seen by the public. The forgotten sixth founding member of the seminal rap group N.W.A. The whirlwind lifestyle of California’s busiest marijuana physician. The Most Interesting Man in the World, in retirement. The former marketing man who is living off the grid on a small plot in suburbia. The secret life of a clown—what happens when the people you’re trying to please start hating you? The tiny island in the Pacific where dominating football players are made and exported in astounding numbers. The secret community of underground hash oil makers known as Wooks.

 Plus: Game of Throne’s Peter Dinklage, Hollywood genius J.J. Abrams, TV pitchman Ron Popeil (Operators are standing by!), and the male supermodel who spent twenty years as a member of a cult. “Mike Sager writes about places and events we seldom get a look at,” said Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Ben Cramer. “But with Sager in command of all the telling details, he shows us history, humanity, humor, sometimes even honor. He makes us glad to live with our eyes wide open.”

“Filled with unforgettable personalities and muscular sentences that mean business, Sager’s incredible stories of celebrities, dreamers and capitalists take readers through the warped frontier of new American excess and commerce, and they locate the pain and beauty in the dark circles under America’s eyes. Thankfully, Sager has a great sense of humor.”—Aaron Gilbreath, editor, Longreads.com, author of Everything We Don’t Know

“I have been a fan of Sager’s work roughly since I learned to read. Whether he’s profiling the actor Peter Dinklage, a professional clown, or almond farmers in California’s Central Valley, Sager gives you a peek into his subject’s soul. How he does it remains a mystery.”—Elon Green, contributor, Harvard’s Neiman Storyboard, The New Yorker