Anthony Valerio
 
 
 
About award-winning author Anthony Valerio's Confessions of an Aspiring Pornographer, Professor Ellen Nerenberg says:
 
"These confessions, mine, Walter Michael Gregory's, center on the interstices between soft and hard literary porn as they were known in the 1960s and 70s."
 This is the kernel of Anthony Valerio's salty and sweet, romping short book, Confessions of an Aspiring Pornographer. Trying to survive as a writer in New York City, Wally joins Ern Billions, Bonita Guggenheim, and Tad Browning as a staff writer at Porn/Prose, where, on spec and on commission, they write porn for hire. And "for hire" is part of the title of the pseudonymous Wally's best-known effort, This Body for Hire, which also has a place within the pages of Valerio's Confessions. Things are hard and soft in so many ways and directions. Among the hard are the winter of 1979, the rules of copyediting that Wally learns at Ern's knee, the lead of the Number 2 pencils he uses to ply his trade as a writers and editor, the concept of one-way staircase that disappears behind anyone who climbs it, the black laces of Sister Morisella's hard-soled black shoes. Among the soft we can group the heart of Anonymous, the hooker Wally invents as the first-person narrator of This Body for Hire, the pillowy arms and bosoms of the women his single mom Caroline surrounds herself with, the rounded characters of the notes Caroline the wordless uses to express herself. Pastiche reigns supreme as genre in this book that pivots between hard and soft, between first and third person narrator, between the writing hand and sober, dignified copyeditor's font and type. Delightful and witty, Confessions of an Aspiring Pornographer is unafraid to own its Times Square-in-the-1970s setting.
Prof. E. Nerenberg, Wesleyan University

news: forthcoming from GRAILING PRESS:

CONFESSIONS OS AN ASPIRING PORNOGRAPHER

update: have recorded two audibles. BEFORE THE SIDEWALK ENDED: A WALK WITH SHEL SIVLERSTEIN and JOHN DANTE'S INFERNO, A PLAYBOY'S LIFE.  Can view on my amazon page.

A great experience reliving those works with my own voice echoing the material in a different way fo me and with a great crew headed by Mark S. thanks everyone. Till the next time. AV

Used to think I'm only as good as my last book. Tonight I'm thinking, only as good as the project working on now. 

working as though each day is the last...

Anthony Valerio is an author, editor and teacher. He was a book editor in major publishing houses, including McGraw-Hill. His stories have appeared in The Paris Review and in anthologies published by The Viking Press and Random House. He is the author of TEN books of fiction and nonfiction, including the cult classics The Mediterranean Runs Through Brooklyn and Valentino and the Great Italians. His bestselling BART: A Life of A. Bartlett Giamatti was praised by Larry King "A wonderful read." His latest work is SEMMELWEIS, THE WOMEN'S DOCTOR: Ignaz Semmelweis

Anthony Valerio taught at New York University, the City University of New York, Wesleyan University and he’s going to start two semesters at a consortium of universities in Bologna, Italy. He lectures widely in the United States and Europe and has been a fiction judge at PEN and The Authors Guild.
His website can be found here.

About Anthony Valerio’s work his friend and legendary children’s book author Shel Silvertein said:

"He knows his craft: he gets in, tells his story and gets out. It’s what good writing should be."