{"product_id":"naked-came-the-stranger","title":"Naked Came the Stranger","description":"xxiv, 245 pp. New introduction by Mike McGrady. \"For talk show host Gillian Blake, the suburbs have long been a paradise. On the radio, she and her husband are Gilly and Billy, local media stars and “New York's Sweethearts of the Air.” At home they're the envy of their neighbors. Only in the bedroom is their life less than perfect. When Gillian learns that her husband has a mistress, she takes revenge the only way she can. With each lover she takes, her lust multiplies, until this demure housewife becomes a creature of pure passion. No man on Long Island—be he hippie, mobster, or rabbi—is safe when Gillian goes on the prowl. Written by Newsday columnist Mike McGrady and a couple dozen of his reporter colleagues under the pseudonym Penelope Ashe, Naked Came the Stranger was one of the great literary hoaxes—an attempt to produce the steamiest and most over-the-top novel of all time, good writing be damned. A sensation upon its first release, this tale of Long Island lust remains a wildly amusing parody potboiler.\" \"Naked Came the Stranger is a 1969 novel written as a literary hoax poking fun at contemporary American culture. Though credited to \"Penelope Ashe\", it was in fact written by a group of twenty-four journalists led by Newsday columnist Mike McGrady. McGrady's intention was to write a deliberately terrible book with a lot of sex, to illustrate the point that popular American literary culture had become mindlessly vulgar. The book fulfilled the authors' expectations and became a bestseller in 1969; they revealed the hoax later that year, further spurring the book's popularity.[1] Mike McGrady was convinced that popular American literary culture had become so base—with the best-seller lists dominated by the likes of Harold Robbins and Jacqueline Susann—that even a wretchedly written, literarily vacant work could succeed if enough sex was thrown in. To test his theory, in 1966 McGrady recruited a team of Newsday colleagues (according to Andreas Schroder,[2] nineteen men and five women) to collaborate on a sexually explicit novel with no literary or social value whatsoever. McGrady co-edited the project with his Newsday colleague Harvey Aronson, and among the other collaborators were well-known writers including 1965 Pulitzer Prize winner Gene Goltz, 1970 Pulitzer Prize winner Robert W. Greene, and journalist Marilyn Berger.[3] The group wrote the book as a deliberately inconsistent and mediocre hodge-podge, with each chapter written by a different author. Some of the chapters had to be heavily edited, because they were originally too well-written. The book was submitted for publication under the pseudonym \"Penelope Ashe\" (portrayed by McGrady's sister-in-law for photographs and meetings with publishers). The book fulfilled McGrady's cynical expectations, selling approximately 90,000 copies by 13 October 1969.[6] As sales continued to increase, many of the co-authors felt guilty about the large amounts of money they were earning,[citation needed] and went public. The male authors gave their \"confession\" on The David Frost Show, after being introduced as \"Penelope Ashe\" and walking out on stage, single file, as the orchestra played the song \"A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody\". By the end of the year, the book had spent 13 weeks on the New York Times Best-Seller List,[1] although by that time its authorship was common knowledge. It is unclear how much of the book's success was due to its content and how much to publicity about its unusual origin. As of May 2012, the book's publisher reported the book had sold 400,000 copies.[1]\"","brand":"Barricade","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39260371025990,"sku":"2310388","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1232\/9510\/products\/2310388.jpg?v=1615995645","url":"https:\/\/ym-demo.myshopify.com\/products\/naked-came-the-stranger","provider":"Yesterday's Muse","version":"1.0","type":"link"}