People have been getting naked in public for reasons other than sex for centuries. But as novelist and narrative journalist Mark Haskell Smith shows in Naked at Lunch, being a nudist is more complicated than simply dropping trou. “Nonsexual social nudism,” as it’s called, rose to prominence in the late nineteenth century. Intellectuals, outcasts, and health nuts from Victorian England and colonial India to Belle Époque France and Gilded Age Manhattan disrobed and wrote manifestos about the joys of going clothing-free. From stories of ancient Greek athletes slathered in olive oil to the millions of Germans who fled the cities for a naked frolic during the Weimar Republic to American soldiers given “naturist” magazines by the Pentagon in the interest of preventing sexually transmitted diseases, Haskell Smith uncovers nudism’s amusing and provocative past.Naked at Lunch is equal parts cultural history and gonzo participatory journalism. Coated in multiple layers of high SPF sunblock, Haskell Smith dives into the nudist world today. He publicly disrobes for the first time in Palm Springs, observes the culture of family nudism in a clothing-free Spanish town, and travels to the largest nudist resort in the world, a hedonist’s paradise in the south of France. He reports on San Francisco’s controversial ban on public nudity, participates in a week of naked hiking in the Austrian Alps, and caps off his adventures with a week on the Big Nude Boat, a Caribbean cruise full of nudists.

Product Description: "Only an imaginative satirist can outpace the world's absurdity, but Mark Haskell Smith manages it with Raw, a super-fun, super-wild, and sneakily thoughtful take on American literary and entertainment excess."—Steve Hely, author of How I Became a Famous NovelistSepp Gregory, a reality-TV hunk and one of People magazine's "sexiest men alive," is on tour to promote his debut novel...read more

Product Description: Reporting for the Los Angeles Times on the international blind tasting competition held annually in Amsterdam known as the Cannabis Cup, novelist Mark Haskell Smith sampled a variety of marijuana that was unlike anything he’d experienced...read more

When a TV producer flies to Hawaii to film a pilot, a fight breaks out over who will cater the shoot. Will it be Joseph and his hot-headed Samoan uncle, who have held a monopoly on the catering business for years? Or Big Jack Lacey, a trash-talking, lap dance-addicted stroke survivor from Las Vegas, and his son?

During a trip to Thailand, Turk Henry, the overweight, unemployed, and super rich former bassist for a defunct megaplatinum-selling rock band, is forced to take on a whole new role as a hero when his supermodel wife is abducted by a group of renegade, shipless Thai pirates, the U.S. government refuses to help, and Thai law forbids him to pay a ransom. Original.

Product Description: When the greedy owner of a Las Vegas movie catering company tries to muscle in on a local, family-owned business in Honolulu, it leaves a very bad taste in the mouths of the natives, and the battle for paradise begins for Joseph, a young Hawaiian chef...read more

His undemanding career set in a tailspin by the appearance of a severed limb that sports a tattoo he recognizes, Bob finds himself transformed into Roberto, a kingpin in the Los Angeles Mexican mafia. Reprint.