The funny, touching story of a sweet, wide-eyed son of Seventies Suburbia who spends a year as a teenage sex worker servicing rich, lonely women in Beverly Hills. After being raped his first night in Hollywood, David meets Sunny, the manager of Hollywood Fried Chicken, who teaches him all about chicken: how to fry one, and how to be one.
But the wild adventures and the mad money are never enough, as he's sucked into the seedy seamy underside of Hollywood: the blank-eyed women, the Fall-of-Rome orgies, and the drugs. With a mix of breathtaking honesty, sly comedy, genuine tenderness, and a wide-eyed fascination for the characters and bizarre world he enters, Sterry creates a narrative that is fresh, smart, and unexpectedly uplifting.
Chicken is a book like no other--a playful, gripping story that explores what it means to suffer through the underbelly of the American Dream. And make it out alive.
The New York Times - Janet Maslin
Sterry writes with comic brio…[he] honed a vibrant outrageous writing style and turned out this studiously wild souvenir of a checkered past.
Jerry Stahl, author of Permanent Midnight
Alternately sexy and terrifying, hysterical and weird, David Henry Sterry's Chicken is a hot walk on the wild side of Hollywood's fleshy underbelly. With lush prose and a flawless ear for the rhythms of the street, Sterry lays out a life lived on the edge in a coming-of-age classic that's colorful, riveting, and strangely beautiful. David Henry Sterry is the real thing.
Phillip Lopate, author of Portrait of My Body
Compulsively readable, visceral, and very funny. The author, a winningly honest companion, has taken us right into his head, moment-by-moment rarely has the mentality of sex been so scrupulously observed and reproduced on paper. Granted, he had some amazingly bizarre experiences to draw upon; but as V. S. Pritchett observed, in memoirs you get no pints for living, the art is all that counts--and David Henry Sterry clearly possesses the storyteller's art.
Larry Mantle, Air Talk, National Public Radio
Insightful and funny… great stories… captures Hollywood beautifully…
Alger Batts, filmmaker
I just wanted to tell you how incredible your book, it's like a Kerouac Chicken. I loved it so much, I HAD to read it in one sitting. I can't wait for the next book.
Recent Reader Reviews
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by NightWing
Does anyone remeber this movie from 15 years ago. Patrick Dempsey played a pizza delivery guy. It was called loverboy. This is such a blatent ripoff I am amazed they did'nt have the guts to call the book LOVERBOY. Rent the movie. Read... Read More
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Loved this book. Magical, quirky, enchanting I could go on. All books do not have to be literary fiction, sometimes it is just so comforting to read...
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U.S. ebook sales up in 2012, but rate of growth is slowing(May 16 2013) In 2012, trade book sales (i.e. non academic book sales) rose 6.9%, to $15.049 billion, and e-book sales continued to grow, although the rate of growth...
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Jerry Stahl, author of Permanent Midnight
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