American G******g
A Love Story
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
A thoughtful, hilarious, and compulsively readable memoir by an Ivy League graduate-turned-pornographer who sets out to bring sophistication and equality to sexual cinema—only to find that he can’t change porn, but porn can certainly change him.
American G******g heralds the arrival of a profound and gifted new voice in narrative nonfiction. In 1999, after four years of studying at Brown University, Sam Benjamin heads to California in a twenty-year-old Volvo, dead set on turning himself into an artist, despite his complete lack of talent. There, stoned, he has an epiphany—he will make progressive porn. And so begins his turbulent journey...
In whip-smart, lyrical prose, Benjamin traces his three-year immersion into the world of Hollywood’s bleak, screen glow–lit doppelganger: the southern California sex industry. His rapid ascent from the dingy storefront rental of a starving artist to the multimillion-dollar Malibu villa of a full-fledged porn producer confronts him with the uncomfortably alluring realities of America's strangest industry: gun-toting actors, high on terrible, drug-induced potency; giggling actresses battling internal demons in wobbly heels and pink fishnets; the insatiable consumer demands to sink ever lower, more exploitative, nastier. The result is the titillating, dramatic chronicle of a young man who invites the deepest, most troubling parts of himself to rise to the surface in order to get a good look at them—only to find that what he sees makes his world seem suddenly very small.
A provocative, universal coming-of-age story, American Gangbang explores with unflinching honesty the darkly rich junction of sex and self-discovery.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A former porn film director, Benjamin has written a fascinating memoir of his journey through the surreal subcultures of the adult entertainment industry. After graduating from Brown University in 1999, Benjamin lands in California, where he has an epiphany: he will make pornos, and they will be art. Numerous false starts, including a video of his masturbating into a banana peel, lead to a Malibu mansion and a job shooting violent interracial porn. Surrounded by a preposterous cast of misfits, Benjamin tries to pursue a healthy relationship with a woman while navigating his obsession with the world of gangbangs and glory holes. Whether he's describing a five-man "blowbang" by the poolside or colonic therapy in Thailand, Benjamin always writes engagingly. The prose shines characters are sharply described, dialogue is witty, and there are moments of epiphanic intensity, such as when Benjamin wriggles with his camera into the midst of the aforementioned blowbang. The lucidity and balance of the writing at times overwhelms the narrator, whose lack of psychological complexity makes it seem like he is being disingenuous. Nevertheless, his book is a disturbing and remarkable debut, and deserves a more serious audience, larger than its title would suggest.
