High Tolerance: A Novel of Sex, Race, Celebrity, Murder... and Marijuana

by Mike Sager

Overview

“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.

In this artful page-turner, a beloved superstarlet, a controversial billionaire hip-hop mogul, and a television writer/producer idled by the demoralizing strike are linked together improbably by murder, domestic heartbreak, a sex video . . . and their inclusion on a secret subscription list for an exclusive designer strain of medical marijuana. Over a span of three seemingly ordinary days and nights in Los Angeles, the world wobbles on its digital axis, and futures are forever changed.

Hollywood, January 2008. The Writers Guild of America is on strike. An increasingly peevish viewing audience is relegated to a starvation diet of reruns and old movies. What happens when a series of shocking, deadly, and prurient events boils over into a perfect storm of serendipitous, round-the-clock programming? And what becomes of the major players, whose lives are unalterably masticated by the public’s right to know?

High Tolerance is the second novel by award-winning Rolling Stone and Esquire journalist Mike Sager, whose work has inspired a number of films, including the classic Boogie Nights. He summons his considerable descriptive and narrative powers—and three decades behind the scenes covering celebrities, gangs, drugs, and crime—to weave together a raw and insightful tale of complicated lives in the shifting racial landscape of turn-of-the-century Los Angeles, the dream factory from which the American Zeitgeist is exported around the globe.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940044548879
Publisher:	The Sager Group
Publication date:	05/22/2013
Sold by:	Smashwords
Format:	eBook
File size:	1 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Mike Sager is a bestselling author and award-winning reporter. He’s been called “the Beat poet of American journalism.” For more than fifteen years he has worked as a Writer-at-Large for Esquire magazine. In 2010 he won the American Society of Magazine Editors’ National Magazine award for profile writing. Sager’s career in journalism began in 1978, when he quit law school after three weeks to take a job on the graveyard shift as a copy boy at The Washington Post. Eleven months later, he was promoted to staff writer by Metro Editor Bob Woodward, of Watergate fame. Sager left the Post after six years to pursue a career in magazines. His first collection of articles, Scary Monsters and Super Freaks, published in 2003, was a Los Angeles Times bestseller, as was his second, Revenge of the Donut Boys, published in 2007. His first novel, Deviant Behavior, was published by Grove/Atlantic’s Black Cat in April, 2008. A third collection, Wounded Warriors, was published in October, 2008 and received the Military Writers Society of America Founder’s Award and the American Author’s Association Golden Quill Award. A former Contributing Editor of Rolling Stone and Writer-at-Large for GQ, Sager has also written for Vibe, Spy, Interview, Playboy, Washingtonian and Regardies. He is proud to be Editor-at-Large for WordsETC, the first black-owned literary magazine of South Africa. For his stories, Sager has lived with a crack gang in Los Angeles; ex-pat Vietnam veterans in Thailand; a 625 pound man in El Monte,CA; teenage pitbull fighters in the Philadelphia barrio; Palestinians in the Gaza Strip; heroin addicts on the Lower East Side; Aryan Nations troopers in Idaho; U.S. Marines at Camp Pendleton; Tupperware saleswomen in suburban Maryland; high school boys in Orange County. Eight of his articles have been optioned for or have inspired Hollywood films. Sager has read and lectured at the schools of journalism at Columbia University, New York University, the University of Illinois, the University of Missouri, and the University of California, Irvine, where he served as a Periera Visiting Writer for four years. His work is included in textbooks presently in use in college classrooms. Born August 17, 1956, Sager is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Emory University and a former intern at the pioneering Atlanta alt-weekly Creative Loafing. He lives with his son in San Diego, California. He is a past recipient of La Jolla Youth Soccer’s “Competitive Manager of the Year” award. The Marinovich Project, a documentary aired by ESPN in 2012, was inspired by ASME winner “The Man Who Never Was” and features Sager as a narrator. For more information, please see www.MikeSager.com and www.TheSagerGroup.com