He’s just crazy enough—
He knows his people—
He knows his craft—
He gets in—tells his story—and gets out—
It’s what good writing should be.
       —Shel Silverstein on Anthony Valerio


Praise for Confessions of an Aspiring Pornographer:

"On the hunt through the city for character, Wally finds it in a variety of strange places and people, including himself.... Like the phantom tigress, Valerio’s lines are simultaneously muscular and elegant. All that power moves easily, leaping from thought to thought with absolutely no strain at all, and with plenty left over, you feel. It’s about being as compact as possible, naturally, with no wasted space, and no wasted word."

—Eric Goldman, Professor of English, University of Saint Joseph


"Pastiche reigns 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. Unafraid to own its Times Square-in-the-1970s setting, Confessions of an Aspiring Pornographer is equal parts lechery and love, and always delightful and witty."
                 
—Ellen Nerenberg, Hollis Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, Professor of Italian, Wesleyan University


Call him Wally. Walter Michael Gregory is a literary rogue peddling his prose and amours around 1970s Manhattan. He talks like Frank Sinatra sings, he writes truly, he is a lover par excellence, and he will charm you with his bawdy confessions.

Raised in Brooklyn by mobsters and his doting mother, Wally recounts his idyllic childhood and how he came to be such an amorous soul. Now stepping into life as a young man about town, he establishes himself in the Greenwich Village literary scene and sets out to find work, any work, in the publishing industry. What he finds is the heady rush of hobknobbing with the greats and the tough truths of working for a living. Forced to live off his literary wits, Wally finds interesting work as a copy editor, encyclopedia writer, and literary pornographer. If he can dodge lovers, hunger, meteors, and a lurking bengal tiger of his own imagining, he might realize his dream, cashing in with his prose and feeling like a writer.

From his boyhood in Brooklyn to the pastimes and pitfalls of a bachelor's life, join Wally on this jaunt through his consciousness and a bygone big city, big book era.