Kicks Books Presents Reading, Haircuts With Legendary Author Harlan Ellison, Los Angeles, 7/13

Brooklyn indie publisher Kicks Books will head to Los Angeles on July 13th to present legendary writer of juvenile delinquent fiction, Harlan Ellison in grand style at the esteemed La Luz Gallery and Soap Plant (4633 Hollywood Blvd) with special guest Patton Oswalt. In this rare personal appearance, Ellison will read-- for the first time in history-- from his pseudonymous and scarce 1959 street fiction, collected now by Kicks Books in two "hip pocket paperbacks" titled 'Pulling A Train' and 'Getting in the Wind.'

The event will begin a few doors down at vintage clip joint Sweeney Todd's Barber Shop (4639 Hollywood Blvd.), where Mr. Ellison will stop in for a quick trim from coif king Sween Lahman.

Afterward, leather clad bodyguards will escort Mr. Ellison down Hollywood Boulevard to the reading where he will sign both Kicks Books--available for purchase alongside commemorative perfumes called Sex Gang and Sin Time, created by Kicks Books' founder Miriam Linna--accompanied by the sounds of loud rock n' roll from 1959. 
Kicks Books fell victim to Hurricane Sandy this past October, when its Red Hook warehouse was submerged in the floodwaters. Although the stock was destroyed, it has now been reprinted in a limited "Hurricane Sandy edition". This event celebrates the return of these truly elusive, and unkillable, Ellison collections.

EVENT DETAILS
WHEN: Saturday, July 13 at 2 PM
WHERE: Sweeny Todd's Barber Shop, 4639 Hollywood Blvd. and La Luz de Jesus Gallery & Soap Plant, 4633 Hollywood Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90027

ABOUT HARLAN ELLISON:
Harlan Ellison was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1934 and grew up in aptly-named nearby Painesville. He ran away from home many times, and worked a colorful string of odd-jobs, including tuna fisherman, crop-picker, nitroglycerine truck driver, door-to-door salesman, and short-order cook. He enrolled at Ohio State from which, after a year and a half, he was promptly expelled for punching out a professor. His writing career began at age 11 with a couple of newspaper serials and the sale of a tale to EC Comics. 

Ellison relocated to New York City in 1955, went underground, and joined a teenage gang in Red Hook, Brooklyn traveling under the gang moniker "Cheech Beldone." 

The experience in a black leather jacket and motorcycle boots would affect his work throughout his long and sturdy career. It was filmed for "The Alfred Hitchcock Hour" as Memos from Purgatory. Where his early delinquent books like THE DEADLY STREETS and WEB OF THE CITY have been reissued over the years, the extremely scarce and desirable SEX GANG, a collection of early men's magazine fare and delinquent-tinged tales, has remained unavailable and unacknowledged until now. 

Ellison has allowed Kicks Books to issue the stories from SEX GANG in two volumes, with several additional stories from the late fifties and early sixties. PULLING A TRAIN and GETTING IN THE WIND, together, encompass all the action, traction and raunch that formed a genre all its own, a style populated by several fiction and science fiction scribes alongside Ellison, but Ellison was, and is, the king of the heap. 

He continues to rule the kingdom from his typewriter-infested abode in an undisclosed wooded area in Southern California, The Lost Aztec Temple of Mars. 

California artist Les Toil's two torrid cover paintings form a seamless image of the true Sex Gang pack-- street vixens who won't take "no" for an answer, alley rats who find the flash of a blade intoxicating, boulevard dolls who delight in the muffled cry of a face crushed beneath scuffed stiletto heels. This is real life set to the sounds of sirens echoing down the dead end streets of America. 

ABOUT KICKS BOOKS:
Kicks Books is an independent publisher based in Brooklyn NY, whose "hip pocket paperback" line reflects the pulp obsessions of founder, Miriam Linna. A longtime collector of printed matter, and paperback books in particular, Linna fulfilled a promise to a friend by publishing his rehab writings in book form. That first hip pocket paperback was "Sweets' by Andre Williams. Kicks Books' roster now features titles by music legends Kim Fowley, Andre Williams, and Sun Ra; novelist Nick Tosches, British beat hero Royston Ellis and American road poet laureate Charles Plymell.