New second edition
Kayfabe Confidential
In 1937, America agreed to settle its fights in the wrestling ring. Nobody told the public the matches were fixed.
Lonnie Beckett spent forty-four years taping anybody who would talk. Then three green account books arrive in a grocery bag, holding the cash behind the Gulf Coast's results from 1971 to 1975, and the reason the territory's best hero died two days later on Highway 90.
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Strikes, liquor licenses, seats on the city council, which family runs the numbers on which side of the creek: for half a century all of it gets decided by two wrestlers, a commission stamp and ten thousand people in the seats who go home and honor the result. The top hero in every city is half sheriff and half saint. He works for a promoter with a cigar who is neither one, and the promoter can be bought.
Lonnie took ringside pictures in Mobile at fourteen, managed heels at nineteen, and spent thirty-five years writing the newsletter every promoter read in his car with the windows up. His tapes hold the old Pittsburgh champions, the women's champion they called the Duchess, a Gulf Coast heel named Cottonmouth Crisp who ran the numbers in Prichard, and a Minnesota farm boy the Federation turned into a god with a needle.
Told in interviews, newsletter pages, police reports, hearing transcripts and a deposition, Kayfabe Confidential is a noir oral history of an America that never was. It's funny in the telling and brutal in what happens.
For readers of World War Z, Watchmen and Dark Side of the Ring. Written for adult readers.
A historical investigation of the Bronze Age collapse
The Sea People
Around 1177 B.C., the world's first global civilization came apart in a single lifetime.
The Hittite Empire went silent. The palace at Pylos burned with its tax records inside. Ugarit's last plea for help was still in the kiln when the city fell. Egypt held on, and carved the invaders into the walls of Medinet Habu.
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The Sea People starts with the club of great kings who traded gold, princesses and insults in the Amarna letters, and the copper and tin that a single ship carried to the bottom off Uluburun. Then it follows the drought, the earthquakes, the famine and the raiders that broke that world.
And it follows the people who came out the other side: the Philistines who settled the coast of Canaan, the Phoenicians who rebuilt the trade routes and spread the alphabet, and a god from the southern mountains named Yahweh.
Scenes from the scribes, messengers and soldiers who lived through it sit alongside the archaeology, with a cast of characters, a timeline of the collapse and a guide to the sources.
About Joseph
Joseph Malott is a writer, teacher, musician and developer. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife, Hannah, and their daughter.
He has taught in Japan and in the United States, worked in several fields, and spent years learning other languages, and all of it ends up in the books.