The Phoenix beach-reading four-pack delivers sex, drugs, and rock and role — plus black-market human organs!
Reading on the beach is a rite of summer as treasured as slathering on globs of coconut oil and squatting in front of a tanning mirror. Of course, five out of five dermatologists recommend that you read this special collection of book excerpts indoors — while wearing a biohazard suit with a beekeeper’s mask — but that’s where we decided to draw the line.
Besides sharing a homegrown quality, each of our four books was penned by an author with Boston-area roots — and flirts with danger.
In Larry’s Kidney, DANIEL ASA ROSE (PEN Fiction winner) tells the hilarious and quite true tale of how his mobbed-up cousin coerced him into going to China to help him hunt for a black-market organ and a mail-order bride.
In It Feels So Good When I Stop, JOE PERNICE (of local rock heroes the Pernice Brothers) pens an extraordinarily amusing novel whose protagonist escapes a one-day marriage and a drug-addled lifestyle to avoid drowning in slacker inertia.
In The Accidental Billionaires, BEN MEZRICH (author of Bringing Down the House) controversially blends fact and fiction to recreate the events that led to the founding of Facebook, revealing that computer programming has certain fringe benefits more akin to being in a hair-metal band.
And, most sobering, in The End of the Long Summer, acclaimed environmental reporter DIANNE DUMANOSKI offers a crystal-ball look into the future of our planet so isturbing that it will probably have you running back into the house for that biohazard suit and beekeeper’s mask.
