White Lines: Writers on Cocaine

Blow, candy, Charlie, coke, go, ice, rock, snow, crack. Whatever you call it, thrill seekers have surrendered to cocaine's siren call, paid their toll, and sold their souls. Its embrace can be deadly, a place of no return, the ultimate rush, public enemy number one. From the gutter to the penthouse, inner city to outer burb, from the Third World coca farmer to the executive addict, coke is the lifeblood of a global black economy and an outlaw underground. Coke has also been dark muse, torment, and theme to many of our greatest writers. White Lines gathers these literary thrill seekers in a classic and contemporary snort through the fog- and fear-filled streets of Victorian London to the dance macabre of the post-Vietnam culture of the 1970s, from the couch of Dr. Freud and the bacchanal of Mr. Magus, Aleister Crowley, to the narcotic thrill of fin de siecle casino capitalism, White Lines takes you into illicit and artificial worlds, near wild heavens and then deep, down underground. Selections from writers like Irvine Welsh, Bret Easton Ellis, William S. Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, Kim Wozencraft, Terry Southern, Sigmund Freud, Arthur Conan Doyle, Peter Biskind, and Julia Phillips are featured.