Memos from Purgatory and Other Works

From the Hugo and Nebula Award–winning author of Strange Wine: A gritty memoir of life in NYC that

became the basis for a Hitchcock TV drama. This audiobook also includes Ellison’s Children of the Streets.

Hemingway said, “A man should never write what he doesn’t know.” In the mid

-fifties, Harlan Ellison—kicked

out of college and hungry to write—went to New York to start his career. It was a time of street gangs, rumbles, kids

with switchblades, and zip guns made from car radio antennas. Ellison was barely out of his teens himself, but he took

a phony name, moved into Brooklyn’s dangerous Red Hook section, and managed to con his way into a “bopping

club.” What he experienced (and the time he spent in jail as a result) was the basis for the violent story that Alfred

Hitchcock filmed as the first of his hour

-long TV dramas. This autobiography is a book whose message you will not

be able to ignore or forget.