In Search of the Lost Tribes of America

Hella Nation

A fascinating, funny and disturbing tour of the lost tribes of America from the award-winning journalist and bestselling author of Generation Kill

A comically macabre portrait of American life...Wright may have even created his own genre of reporting.

Priceless... staggering... takes your breath away

Readers of Generation Kill will definitely want to pick up this hugely entertaining book. Funny, mesmerizing, frightening, and mind-boggling

[Evan Wright's] style owes more to Hunter S. Thompson than to any sort of political correctness

Vivid confirmation of the arrival of a major chronicler of those who live on or beyond the margins of the American mainstream

It's refreshing to read first-person journalism by an unorthodox P.T. Barnum who refuses to put himself at the centre of a three-ring circus

EVAN WRIGHT is the author of Generation Kill, one of the most celebrated books on the Iraq War and recently adapted by David Simon into a 7-hour HBO miniseries. He is a recipient of the National Magazine Award, a Los Angeles Times Book Award, a PEN/Faulkner Award and a Lukas Book Prize. He is also a contributing editor to Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair.

Hella Nation charts Wright's deeply personal journey, from his stark but sympathetic portrayals of sex workers in Porn Valley to his raw portrait of a Hollywood über-agent turned war documentarian and hero of America's far right. Along the way he meets runaway teens in Hollywood earning corporate dollars as skateboard pitchmen, radical anarchists plotting the overthrow of capitalism from tree-sits in the Oregon rainforest and young American troops on the hunt for terrorists in the combat zones of the Middle East. His subjects are people for whom The American Dream is either just out of grasp, or something they have chosen to reject altogether. 
 
Sometimes frightening, usually profane, and often darkly comic, Hella Nation is Wright's meticulously observed tour of the jagged edges of all those other Americas hiding in plain sight.

Generation Kill

Tie-in edition about the shocking and visceral story of First Recon - the first unit of marines behind enemy lines in Iraq.

This is war reporting up there with such greats as Michael Herr's Dispatches

Easily the best book on the Iraq war so far. A deeply disturbing, compulsively readable narrative offering profound insights into the lives of America's young soldiers

An adrenaline rush of intelligent prose. One of the best books to come out of the Iraq war

Generation Kill is about the young men sent to fight their nation's first open-ended war since Vietnam. Despite the flurry of media images to come of the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, you have never really met any of these people, who serve as front-line troops. For whatever reason, the media simply doesn't get them. As we all know, news accounts of the last two wars focused almost exclusively on battlefield imagery of high-tech weapons wreaking astounding destruction, comply with analysis from retired army grandees and other experts, punctuated by the odd heart-warming patriotic sound-bite. The troops themselves play a role in the media's presentation of recent wars rather like extras in The Triumph of the Will. They are everywhere yet somehow invisible. When they speak you get the sense that what they are saying has been carefully scripted. Now Generation Kill tells the soldiers' story in their own words. 
 
The narrative focuses on a platoon of 23 marines, many of them veterans of Afghanistan, whose elite reconnaissance unit spearheaded the blitzkrieg on Iraq. This is the story of young men that have been trained to become ruthless killers. It's about surviving death. It's about taking part in a war many questioned before it even began. 
 
Evan Wright was the only reporter with First Recon, which operated well ahead of most other forces, usually behind enemy lines. They were among the first marines sent into the fight and one of the last units still engaged on the outskirts of Iraq, even after the city centre fell. Generation Kill is not just a combat chronicle but an inside look at how people fighting in war actually experience it. It is both an action narrative like Black Hawk Down and a detailed portrait of a generation at war along the lines of Band of Brothers. It is not a book you are going to forget in a hurry...

Jon Roberts

Evan Wright

A spellbinding narrative of drugs, death and debauchery as told by one of America's most notorious criminals... A savage, unrelenting tale

A tour de force. The best crime book since Wiseguy. Puts you in the middle of a world where it's wonderful to be a tourist, terrible to be a resident. I am filled with nothing but admiration and envy for Evan Wright

Rich Cohen, author of THE FISH THAT ATE THE WHALE

Imagine if Mister Kurtz from Heart of Darkness sat down with Dick Cavett for a little chat about the nature of good and evil, empathy, fatherhood, violence, drugs, power, self-knowledge, women, family, the hero versus the anti-hero, freedom, imprisonment...Try as you might, you can't really put this book down

Doug Stanton, author of HORSE SOLDIERS and IN HARM’S WAY

Seldom have I read an account of criminal enterprise that took me so deeply into the blackness of a man’s soul – a scary read, pounding and relentless and irresistible

American Desperado is the first great crime book of the 21st Century. Dangerous, darkly hilarious, hair-raising, and terrifically written, Wright's prose spills over with the kind of insane, brilliantly rendered detail and dialogue that make you want to call people at four in the morning and read out loud

Jerry Stahl, bestselling author of PERMANENT MIDNIGHT

My life as a Cocaine Cowboy

‘The best crime book since Wiseguy’ – Rich Cohen 
 
A real-life Scarface, Jon was born into the Gambino Mafia family and witnessed his first murder aged seven. He joined a US Army assassination squad in Vietnam to escape a teen criminal charge, then fled New York to reinvent himself in Miami as the number one supplier of cocaine in the US. With a crazed bodyguard always at his side, and a fortress protected by mortars, tear-gas cannons, and a gold-fanged attack dog, Roberts was brutally effective at what he did. 
 
With a cast that includes everyone from Jimi Hendrix and OJ Simpson to the CIA and General Noriega, American Desperado is a hedonistic, adrenaline-soaked joyride through the world of Escobar and the cartels, told by one of most successful criminals of all time.

Evan Wright

Praise for American Desperado

An American criminal mastermind

A spellbinding narrative of drugs, death and debauchery as told by one of America's most notorious criminals... A savage, unrelenting tale

A tour de force. The best crime book since Wiseguy. Puts you in the middle of a world where it's wonderful to be a tourist, terrible to be a resident. I am filled with nothing but admiration and env ...

An American criminal mastermind

A spellbinding narrative of drugs, death and debauchery as told by one of America's most notorious criminals... A savage, unrelenting tale

A tour de force. The best crime book since Wiseguy. Puts you in the middle of a world where it's wonderful to be a tourist, terrible to be a resident. I am filled with nothing but admiration and env ...

An American criminal mastermind

A spellbinding narrative of drugs, death and debauchery as told by one of America's most notorious criminals... A savage, unrelenting tale

A tour de force. The best crime book since Wiseguy. Puts you in the middle of a world where it's wonderful to be a tourist, terrible to be a resident. I am filled with nothing but admiration and env ...

Books by Evan Wright

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter