Most Popular Books by John Waters

A hilariously filthy tale of sex, crime, and family dysfunction from the brilliantly twisted mind of John Waters, the legendary filmmaker and bestselling author of Mr. Know-It-All. Marsha Sprinkle: Suitcase thief. Scammer. Master of disguise. Dogs and children hate her. Her own family wants her dead. She’s smart, she’s desperate, she’s disturbed, and she’s on the run with a big chip on her shoulder. They call her Liarmouth—until one insane man makes her tell the truth. Liarmouth, the first novel by John Waters, is a perfectly perverted “feel-bad romance,” and the reader will thrill to hop aboard this delirious road trip of riotous revenge.

An outrageous collection from the uniquely legendary John Waters, updated with new material—including Waters’s 2002 New York Times article, “Finally, Footlights on the Fat Girls.” Crackpot, originally released in 1986, is John Waters’s brilliantly entertaining litany of odd and fascinating people, places, and things. From Baltimore to Los Angeles, from William Castle to Pia Zadora, from the National Enquirer to Ronald Reagan’s colon, Waters explores the depths of our culture. And he dispenses useful advice along the way: how not to make a movie, how to become famous (read: infamous), and of course, how to most effectively shock and make our nation’s public laugh at the same time. Loaded with bonus features, this special edition is guaranteed to leave you totally mental.

"John Waters hitchhikes across America"--Dust jacket cover.

From an icon of popular culture, here is inspiring advice for artists, graduates, and all who seek happiness and success on their own terms. So what if you have talent? Then what? When John Waters delivered his gleefully subversive advice to the graduates of the Rhode Island School of Design, the speech went viral, in part because it was so brilliantly on point about making a living as a creative person. Now we can all enjoy his sly wisdom in a manifesto that reminds us, no matter what field we choose, to embrace chaos, be nosy, and outrage our critics. Anyone embarking on a creative path, he tells us, would do well to realize that pragmatism and discipline are as important as talent and that rejection is nothing to fear. Waters advises young people to eavesdrop, listen to their enemies, and horrify us with new ideas. In other words, MAKE TROUBLE! Illustrated with slightly demented line drawings by Eric Hanson, Make Trouble is a one-of-a-kind gift, the perfect playbook for gaming the system by making the system work for you.

Role Models is a personal invitation into one of the most unique, perverse, and hilarious artistic minds of our time. From the incomparable John Waters, a paean to the power of subversive inspiration that will delight, amuse, enrich—and happily horrify readers everywhere. Role Models is, in fact, a self-portrait told through intimate profiles of favorite personalities—some famous, some unknown, some criminal, some surprisingly middle-of-the-road. From Esther Martin, owner of the scariest bar in Baltimore, to the playwright Tennessee Williams; from the atheist leader Madalyn Murray O''Hair to the insane martyr Saint Catherine of Siena; from the English novelist Denton Welch to the timelessly appealing singer Johnny Mathis—these are the extreme figures who helped the author form his own brand of neurotic happiness.

The return of a spectacular, reviled, and iconic classic of American filth! John Waters takes us back to the scene of his original crime against good taste. Watch as Babs Johnson fights to hold on to her title as “Filthiest Person Alive,“ fending off the craven attempts to dethrone her by her nemeses Connie and Raymond Marble. Read along as Waters takes us on a romp through his camp and filthy vision of Baltimore, from nefarious baby-stealing lesbians to scenes of unspeakable things done to unsuspecting chickens, to the film’s iconic and revolting coup de grace (no spoilers, but it is just as stomach-churning on the page more than fifty years later!). Pink Flamingos is John Waters at his provocative, disgusting, piety-puncturing best, with the hellish and hilarious trash masterpiece that first made him a household name.

No one knows more about everything—especially everything rude, clever, and offensively compelling—than John Waters. The man in the pencil-thin mustache, auteur of the transgressive movie classics Pink Flamingos, Polyester, Hairspray, Cry-Baby, and A Dirty Shame, is one of the world’s great sophisticates, and in Mr. Know-It-All he serves it up raw: how to fail upward in Hollywood; how to develop musical taste, from Nervous Norvus to Maria Callas; how to build a home so ugly and trendy that no one but you would dare live in it; more important, how to tell someone you love them without emotional risk; and yes, how to cheat death itself. Through it all, Waters swears by one undeniable truth: “Whatever you might have heard, there is absolutely no downside to being famous. None at all.” Studded with cameos, from Divine and Mink Stole to Johnny Depp, Kathleen Turner, Patricia Hearst, and Tracey Ullman, and illustrated with unseen photos from the author''s personal collection, Mr. Know-It-All is Waters’ most hypnotically readable, upsetting, revelatory book—another instant Waters classic. “Waters doesn’t kowtow to the received wisdom, he flips it the bird . . . [Waters] has the ability to show humanity at its most ridiculous and make that funny rather than repellent.” —Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post “Carsick becomes a portrait not just of America’s desolate freeway nodes—though they’re brilliantly evoked—but of American fame itself.” —Lawrence Osborne, The New York Times Book Review

One part of John Waters’ iconic Trash Trilogy, Flamingos Forever is a dark-comedy screenplay about a drag queen trying to retain her title of “Filthiest Person in the World.” Fifteen years after the events of Pink Flamingos, Babs Johnson returns to Baltimore from a life spent largely in bus station lavatories, only to find that she once again has to fight for the right to claim the title of “World’s Filthiest Person.” Her nemesis Connie Marble’s sister, Vera Venninger, and her necrophiliac husband, Wilbur, are in her way. So begins a new battle of filth. This raucous, filthy—and essential!—volume in John Waters’ oeuvre never made it to the screen, so this is readers’ and his legions of fans’ one chance to see how this ghastly and irreverent saga meets its end!

A very John Waters traveling show, replete with freaks, robbery, murder, sex, blasphemy, and savage shellfish—a lurid, surreal celebration of camp and trash. The Cavalcade of Perversion is a traveling show run by Lady Divine and a crew of her fellow degenerates. They have to drag suburban housewives into each vile, tasteless performance—only to rob them at gunpoint at the end of each show. When Divine gets bored of the routine and graduates to murdering the attendees one day, it sets her off on a rampage, hunting down her cheating lover, Mr. David, and unleashing a chain of frenzy, a truly blasphemous sex act, and a surreal violation by a giant lobster. Multiple Maniacs is John Waters’ paean to the glories of trash. As Lady Divine chants as she marches proudly into downtown Baltimore at the end of the movie, “I’m a maniac! A maniac that cannot be cured! O Divine, I am Di-vine!”

“Burroughs famously dubbed Waters the Pope of Trash. Female Trouble, we might say, is his Summa Trashologica.” —Ed Halter, The Criterion Collection It all goes to hell when Baltimore bad girl Dawn Davenport doesn’t get the cha-cha heels she’s been demanding for Christmas. In this hilarious, irreverent, pyrotechnic melee of high-trash hijinks, Dawn ruins Christmas, skips town, and embarks on a wild ride that involves hitchhiking, robbery, murder, pregnancy—and, of course, modeling and glamour, too. The second installment of John Waters’ classic Trash Trilogy, Female Trouble explodes conventional norms of good behavior (and art) and is all the proof you’ll ever need that sometimes being bad can feel so, so very good.

A grotesque and hilarious satire about the American dream, suburban living, and the corrupting influence of power, set in a world that could only have sprung from the unhinged and brilliant mind of John Waters. On the verge of a suburban mental health crisis, frazzled and wildly unstable housewife Peggy (immortalized by Mink Stole on-screen) runs away from home with her maid and partner in crime, Grizelda (played with spectacular gumption by the sizzling Jean Hill), only to end up in Mortville, a shantytown filled with society’s rejects. Mortville is run by the evil Queen Carlotta, who parades through the cardboard streets taunting and terrorizing her subjects. John Waters’ wild and visionary fable lampoons everything from the staid conservatism of the American dream to race and class relations. The New York Times ranked Desperate Living at “the highest peak atop [John Waters’] trash heap of a filmography.” High praise indeed!

A feel-good fable and an enduring critique of conformity told with true John Waters flair. Tracy Turnblad, a spunky, full-figured Baltimore teen, wants nothing more than to be a featured dancer on The Corny Collins Show. So when she gets chosen to be on the air, it seems like all her dreams are about to come true. But when she and some of the Black cast of the show try to integrate the segregated dancing, things take on a life of their own. A sweet, hopeful parable about the dangers of conformity and segregation, Hairspray is perhaps the one optimistic entry in John Waters’ shocking and delightfully deranged oeuvre. Both a clear-eyed social critique and a celebration of the dizzying aesthetics of Baltimore in the early 1960s, this is another, softer side to the essential John Waters.

Waters has teamed up with art critic Hainley to offer a provocative and personal interpretation of sex and sexuality today through the window of contemporary art. They discuss a range of recent works of art, from graphic depictions of the body to abstract images.

In 1991, Ireland was in the midst of a devastating recession; thousands of young Irish men and women had emigrated over the previous decade, and divisive social and moral debates on abortion and divorce had rocked Irish society. The great pillars of society - politics and religion - were beginning to crumble, a process that continued in subsequent years as both institutions were hit by scandal. A questioning of the values on which Ireland had been built had begun, with an apparently unbridgeable divide opening between "traditionalists" and "modernizers". At the start of the decade, the modernizers appeared to have won, with the election as President of the iconic Mary Robinson. Irish Times columnist John Waters captured the zeitgeist of the time with the hugely successful Jiving at the Crossroads, which sold over 50,000 copies. A defining book of the era, its success was partly due to its remarkable blending of social/cultural commentary with personal memoir. At the emotional core of the book was the relationship between John and his father, and the story of Ireland was intricately woven into this powerful narrative. It was the first in a long line of books to question the very notion of modern Irish identity, and to examine the deep-rooted tensions at the heart of the Irish psyche. Twenty years later, much has changed in Ireland, and yet Jiving at the Crossroads remains a deeply resonant book, particularly in the light of the remarkable rise and precipitous fall of the Celtic Tiger, and the fresh questioning of how we got where we are now. This twentieth anniversary reissue of a landmark book, with a new Afterword, will be welcomed by those who remember it, and will be a fascinating insight for a new generation of Irish people.

The cult filmmaker recalls his favorite movies and directors, and discusses how films like Female Trouble, Desperate Living, and Pink Flamingoes were made