Jerry Stahl on a bus trip to Auschwitz, his friendship with Anthony Bourdain, and Nathaniel West’s The Day of the Locust.

Send us Fan MailA bus trip to Auschwitz in the company of the writer Jerry Stahl, who in 2016 set off for Poland to confront one of the darkest chapters in human history. The resulting book, Nein Nein Nein, is fast-paced, darkly absurd, and mordantly funny without ever minimizing the horrors at its center. In that regard it has something in common with Stahl’s best-selling memoir, Permanent Midnight, in which he mined both humor and pathos from his harrowing experience as a spiraling heroin addict trying to manage a high-flying script-writing career in 1980s Hollywood. That book was, was made into a 1998 movie starring Ben Stiller as Stahl, is also a brilliant satire of Hollywood, so it’s not surprising that he cites Nathaniel West’s classic Hollywood novel, Day of the Locust, as the book that inspired him to be a writer.