About the Author
John Waters is an American filmmaker, actor, writer and visual artist best know for his cult films, including Hairspray, Pink Flamingos and Cecil B. DeMented. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland.
Featured books by John Waters
Role Models
Featured on The Book Show on Sky Arts on 20 January 2011. A self-portrait told through intimate literary profiles of John Waters' favourite personalities - some famous, some less well-known. A paean to the power of subversive inspiration that will delight, amuse, enrich and happily horrify readers everywhere.
Other books by John Waters
Make Trouble
So what if you have talent? Then what? When John Waters delivered his gleefully subversive advice to the graduates of the Rhode Island School of Design, the speech went viral, in part because it was so brilliantly on point about making a living as a creative person. Now we can all enjoy his sly wisdom in a manifesto that reminds us, no matter what field we choose, to embrace chaos, be nosy, and outrage our critics. Anyone embarking on a creative path, he tells us, would do well to realize that pragmatism and discipline are as important as talent and that rejection is nothing to fear. Waters advises young people to eavesdrop, listen to their enemies, and horrify us with new ideas. In other words, MAKE TROUBLE! Illustrated with slightly demented line drawings by Eric Hanson, Make Trouble is a one-of-a-kind gift, the perfect playbook for gaming the system by making the system work for you.
Carsick
John Waters is putting his life on the line. Armed with wit, a pencil-thin moustache, and a cardboard sign that reads 'I'm Not Psycho', he hitchhikes across America from Baltimore to San Francisco, braving lonely roads and treacherous drivers. But who should we be more worried about, the delicate film director with genteel manners or the unsuspecting travelers transporting the Pope of Trash? Along the way, Waters fantasizes about the best and worst possible scenarios: a friendly drug dealer hands over piles of cash to finance films with no questions asked, a demolition-derby driver makes a filthy sexual request in the middle of a race, a gun-toting drunk terrorizes and holds him hostage, and a Kansas vice squad entraps and throws him in jail. So what really happens when this cult legend sticks out his thumb and faces the open road? Laced with subversive humour and warm intelligence, Carsick is an unforgettable ride with a wickedly funny companion - and a celebration of America's weird, astonishing, and generous citizens.
Carsick
John Waters is putting his life on the line. Armed with wit, a pencil-thin moustache, and a cardboard sign that reads 'I'm Not Psycho', he hitchhikes across America from Baltimore to San Francisco, braving lonely roads and treacherous drivers. But who should we be more worried about, the delicate film director with genteel manners or the unsuspecting travelers transporting the Pope of Trash? Along the way, Waters fantasizes about the best and worst possible scenarios: a friendly drug dealer hands over piles of cash to finance films with no questions asked, a demolition-derby driver makes a filthy sexual request in the middle of a race, a gun-toting drunk terrorizes and holds him hostage, and a Kansas vice squad entraps and throws him in jail. So what really happens when this cult legend sticks out his thumb and faces the open road? Laced with subversive humour and warm intelligence, Carsick is an unforgettable ride with a wickedly funny companion - and a celebration of America's weird, astonishing, and generous citizens.
Role Models
Role Models is a wild and witty self-portrait of John Waters, America's 'Pope of Trash', told through intimate profiles of his favourite personalities - some famous, some unknown, some criminal, some surprisingly middle of the road. From Esther Martin, owner of the scariest bar in Baltimore, to the playwright Tennessee Williams; from the atheist leader Madalyn Murray O'Hair to the insane martyr Saint Catherine of Siena; from the English novelist Denton Welch to the timelessly appealing singer Johnny Mathis - these are the extreme figures who helped John Waters form his own brand of neurotic happiness. A paean to the power of subversive inspiration that delights, amuses and happily horrifies in equal measure...
Jiving At The Crossroads (New Edition)
In 1991, Ireland was in the midst of a devastating recession; thousands of young Irish men and women had emigrated over the previous decade, and divisive social and moral debates on abortion and divorce had rocked Irish society. The great pillars of society - politics and religion - were beginning to crumble, a process that continued in subsequent years as both institutions were hit by scandal. A questioning of the values on which Ireland had been built had begun, with an apparently unbridgeable divide opening between traditionalists and modernizers . At the start of the decade, the modernizers appeared to have won, with the election as President of the iconic Mary Robinson. Irish Times columnist John Waters captured the zeitgeist of the time with the hugely successful Jiving at the Crossroads, which sold over 50,000 copies. A defining book of the era, its success was partly due to its remarkable blending of social/cultural commentary with personal memoir. At the emotional core of the book was the relationship between John and his father, and the story of Ireland was intricately woven into this powerful narrative. It was the first in a long line of books to question the very notion of modern Irish identity, and to examine the deep-rooted tensions at the heart of the Irish psyche. Twenty years later, much has changed in Ireland, and yet Jiving at the Crossroads remains a deeply resonant book, particularly in the light of the remarkable rise and precipitous fall of the Celtic Tiger, and the fresh questioning of how we got where we are now. This twentieth anniversary reissue of a landmark book, with a new Afterword, will be welcomed by those who remember it, and will be a fascinating insight for a new generation of Irish people.
Feckers: 50 People Who Fecked Up Ireland 50 People Who Fecked Up Ireland
Which 50 People turned Ireland into the fecked-up country she is today? Bono? Haughey? Louis Walsh? de Valera? It's time to name and shame the great, the good and the gobshites... Conventional wisdom has it that Ireland, after a violent and tragic history, had began to get things right. But when the ill wind of recession cruelly snatched that self-satisfied achievement away, it all seemed like exceedingly back luck. In his 50 brilliantly acerbic portraits Waters reveals a consistent pattern of self-delusion, myopia, inferiority complex, bravado, defeatism, cynicism, sentimentalism and conceit. He traces Ireland's story from the paranoid insularism and cultural myopia that followed national Independence, though the post-Sixties obsession with a faux 'self-confidence', to the final, salutary meltdown of the Celtic Tiger, and strangely lacking either Celts or tigers. Once among the oldest civilization in Europe, Ireland has ended up as a second-rate version of the England it tried to discard. It threw out not merely the bathwater and the baby, but also the bathtub, the sponge and the rubber duck...
Beyond Consolation
Waters explores the process by which the hope of a society was sabotaged and plundered in the name of a mis-defined freedom and a utopia of the now. In the late spring of 2008 the acclaimed Irish writer Nuala O' Faolain went on a national Irish radio program to tell the Irish people that she was dying of cancer. She was frightened of death and of the short time left to her. She went right to the heart of the modern attitude to God, to hope, to life and death. Here was a spokesperson for a generation which now conjured up an abyss for itself, reviewing a culture she had inhabited and helped to create one last time. She believed neither in an afterlife nor in God. This abyss, argues John Waters, is created by pursuing the failed hypothesis that humankind can live without God. The despair she expressed is the despair of a generation which believed it could create a utopia of reason, free of the encumberments of tradition and the dread of the absolute. With Nuala O' Faolain's broadcast as his point of departure, Waters examines this trajectory of Irish Culture to this point of despair. How reasonable is it to believe in nothing? He explores a new language to excavate the journey of Irish society from what appeared to be profound in its traditional faith to this moment of what might easily have been taken as a moment of nihilistic clarity. What modern men and women suffer from in modern culture is the lack of an idea of the infinite and the eternal. Secularization, he argues, is completely meaningless as a term to describe what has happened to them. Taking up the theme of his previous best selling book Lapsed Agnostic , Waters explores the process by which the hope of a society was sabotaged and plundered in the name of a mis-defined freedom and a utopia of the now.
Lapsed Agnostic
Lapsed Agnostic tells the story of one man's journey from belief to un-belief and back again. In the style of his bestseller Jiving at the Crossroads , John Waters explores his own spiritual and religious adventure and observes how this has been echoed in contemporary society. John Waters was born in the west of Ireland into a small town community steeped in Catholic tradition. As a young man disillusioned by Irish society and the Church he abandoned the idea of becoming a priest. Instead he took to the rock and roll life as a kind of surrogate vocation, moving into music journalism and eventually finding his way to Dublin.In 1991 he published Jiving at the Crossroads and a second book, Race of Angels: Ireland and the Genesis of U2 , followed in 1996. He has become an outspoken campaigner for fathers rights in Ireland. This is just part of the story recounted in this remarkable book. But it is about so much more and, like its author, is sure to cause enormous interest and controversy.
The Politburo Has Decided That You are Unwell
For nearly fifteen years John Waters has been a dissident voice writing in his weekly column for The Irish Times, invariably confronting the conventional wisdom on issues ranging from fatherhood and the official denial of the rights of parents and children, to the absurdity of Ireland's seemingly endless tribunals. He is known for an elegant representation of common sense in the face of ideology, received thinking, and self-serving cant. In these controversial and highly-charged pieces he revisits his principal themes and concerns of a most turbulent decade in Ireland and the world, providing an invigorating look at how Ireland and its place in the world have changed in that time.