Any true love story, if told with the urgency and animal intelligence of love, isn't for the fiainthearted. On every page of this profound, distilled work of art, Stephen Elliott wrestles with the unknown so beautifully, with such clear-eyed fearlessness-imagine a glass of pure water with one drop of blood handing in its center, about to dissolve-then drink it and be transformed. - Nick Flynn

Best of the year: Salon.com, San Francisco Chronicle

Reviews: Salon.com, LA Weekly

Excerpts: My Stripper Year, Just Always Be Good

Purchase from Powells, Cleis, and your local bookstore

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What It Means To Love You. Purchase from Amazon.

"A Life Without Consequences was harrowing, hard as nails, brutal, and soaring. Stephen Elliott has to be watched, because he knows things almost no one else could." - Dave Eggers

Purchase from Amazon.

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On February 27, 2007, during an interview with Amy Goodman, General Wesley Clark referred to a conversation in the Pentagon in 2002 confirming America was going to invade Iraq. He was also made aware of a top secret memorandum outlining seven countries after Iraq we were going to "take out" over the next five years. Most of us will never get to see this memo, but we know it exists.

In the summer of 2007, over three months, editor Stephen Elliott, authors Jason Roberts, Eric Martin, and Andrew Altschul, and a team of fifteen college students, set out to re-create this memorandum. The results were seven essays, 100% factual, laying out in stark detail how the argument for invasion could be made. The lesson is obvious, but scary. In times when all the libraries in the world are available with a click of the mouse, anyone determined enough can manipulate the truth to prove a threat and present a plan that, if taken seriously, could result in violent conflict. If you aren't already sure, this book will convince you of the value of a healthy sceptisism when our leaders push us to war.

Purchase from McSweeney's, Booksmith, or Powell's.

"Happy Baby is surely the most intelligent and beautiful book ever written about juvenile detention centers, sadomasochism, and drugs." - Curtis Sittenfeld, The New York Times Book Review

Best of the year: Village Voice, Salon.com, Chicago New City, The Journal News

Awards: Finalist Young Lions Award, Silver Medal California Book Award

Reviews: The New York Times, Salon.com, Village Voice

Purchase from Amazon or your local bookstore

Download entire book as a pdf

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"Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer, Richard Ben Cramer: the great, all-American genre of the political campaign in extenso (and in extremis) has had its Homers and Boswells. To that list we can now add Stephen Elliott. Hilarious, strange, electrifyingly written, and heart-pumpingly idealistic, Looking Forward to It wins every literary caucus and primary in a landslide." -Tom Bissell, author of Chasing the Sea

Best of the year: Village Voice

Reviews: New York Magazine, New York Times

Excerpts: The Dennis Kucinich Polka, A John Edwards Almanac

Purchase from Powell's (cheap!), and your local bookstore