The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture

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, storytelling, and journalism, spawning hundreds of copycats.

In The Freaks Came Out to Write, former Voice writer Tricia Romano draws from more than 200 interviews to pay homage to this iconic paper. Alive with the voices of two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Colson Whitehead, cultural critic Greg Tate, gossip columnist Michael Musto, feminist writers Vivian Gornick and Susan Brownmiller, post-punk band Blondie, sportscaster Bob Costas, drummer Max Weinberg, and many more, this definitive oral history tells the story of journalism, New York City, and the most famous alt-weekly of all time.

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Tricia Romano began her career at the Village Voice, where her column, Fly Life, covered the underbelly of New York nightlife. A fellow at MacDowell, Ucross, and Millay artist residencies, her work has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, The Daily Beast, Dame, and Men’s Journal. A longtime New Yorker, she lives in Seattle, Washington.