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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