Mark Binelli

Mark Binelli, author of Green Apple staff favorite Detroit City is the Place to Be, reads from his new novel, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ All-Time Greatest Hits.

Praise for Mark Binelli:

“At once hilarious and sharp, sweeping and intimate, Detroit City Is the Place to Be is an oddly delighted warning from the recent future. Mark Binelli writes with the tender scrutiny of a returning exile, in a style that manages to infuse Rolling Stone vigor with Spy wit, Baffler skepticism, and n+1 intelligence. This is a nonfiction novel about our American experiment—grand and grandiose, unprecedented and absurd—and it’s the most entertaining and persuasive book about this country I’ve read in a very long time.” —Gideon Lewis-Kraus on Detroit City is the Place to Be

“A sweeping narrative encompassing everything from the struggles of Italian-American immigrants to the social dynamics of pie fights. . . [with] joyful nostalgia, pinpoint characterizations and postmodern brio.” –New York Times Book Review on Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die!

About Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ All-Time Greatest Hits:

Mark Binelli turns his sharp, forceful prose to fiction, in an inventive retelling of the outrageous life of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, a bluesman with one hit and a string of inflammatory guises.

He came on stage in a coffin, carried by pallbearers, drunk enough to climb into his casket every night. Onstage he wore a cape, clamped a bone to his nose, and carried a staff topped with a human skull. Offstage, he insisted he’d been raised by a tribe of Blackfoot Indians, that he’d joined the army at fourteen, that he’d defeated the middleweight boxing champion of Alaska, that he’d fathered seventy-five illegitimate children.

The R&B wildman Screamin’ Jay Hawkins only had a single hit, the classic “I Put a Spell On You,” and was often written off as a clownish novelty act — or worse, an offense to his race — but his myth-making was legendary. In his second novel, Mark Binelli embraces the man and the legend to create a hilarious, tragic, fantastical portrait of this unlikeliest of protagonists. Hawkins saw his life story as a wild picaresque, and Binelli’s novel follows suit, tackling the subject in a dazzling collage-like style.

At Rolling Stone, Binelli has profiled some of the greatest musicians of our time, and this novel deftly plays with the inordinate focus on “authenticity” in so much music writing about African-Americans. An entire novel built around a musician as deliberately inauthentic as Screamin’ Jay Hawkins thus becomes a sort of subversive act, as well as an extremely funny and surprisingly moving one.