Anthony Valerio's novel Confessions of an Aspiring Pornographer (Grailing Press, 2024) tells the story of Walter Michael Gregory. 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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature