Books by Franz Douskey

An intimate look at the legendary Frank Sinatra by one of his closest friends.

A long overdue collection, WEST OF MIDNIGHT: NEW & SELECTED POEMS, by Franz Douskey, places new works alongside pieces drawn from a decades-spanning career to illustrate the breadth of an influential and singular voice in poetry. Franz Douskey's insights are uniquely his, his voice direct and his imagination meteoric. Douskey has lived long and large. His readings and travels with such notables as James Dickey, Allen Ginsberg, Ai, Charles Bukowski, and F. D. Reeve are legendary. The poems are rich in wit, irreverence and a furious honesty. Everything is autobiographical. From intimate relationships, political quagmires, baseball and eroticism, Douskey wields an acerbic wit and a delicate command of tone to dive into the contradictions that make us human. From the haunted urban alleys of a turbulent childhood to his rhapsodic journeys through the nocturnal deserts of the Southwest, Douskey revels both in the absurdity of modern civilization and the heart-stopping beauty of the natural world. --Robert Reinhardt

"You Thought It Was More" is a profane and raucously funny memoir from the world's greatest counterfeiter, Louis 'The Coin' Colavecchio. Colavecchio, who created mass quantities of undetectable slot machine tokens, writes with commanding vigor about his wild adventures throughout the US and Europe His talents as a jeweler, manufacturer and man of romance are part of the historical record - as seen on The History Channel and The BBC. It might be an understatement to say Colavecchio changed the face of casino gambling forever. Ride with Louis The Coin at 160 mph in his Lamborghini making score after score. From Providence to Atlantic City and Vegas to Rome, Milan, Florence and Geneva, he's the genuine article. As one of the cops who arrested Louis notes in the introduction, "He was very creative, an artist." Who knew metallurgy could be riveting? What? You thought it was more ...