'The only Lou Reed bio you need to read' The Washington Post One of Pitchfork's ten best music
books of 2023 A Kirkus Reviews best nonfiction book of 2023 'A monumental work filled with
first-person accounts of the master's life and a dizzying array of never-before heard details'
Michael Imperioli author of The Perfume Burned His Eyes The most complete and penetrating
biography of the rock master whose stature grows every year. Since his death ten years ago
Lou Reed's living presence has only grown. The great rock-poet presided over the marriage of
Brill Building pop and the European avant-garde and left American culture transfigured. In Lou
Reed: The King of New York Will Hermes offers the definitive narrative of Reed's life and
legacy dramatizing his long brilliant and contentious dialogue with fans critics fellow
artists and assorted habitués of the demimonde. We witness Reed's complex partnerships with
David Bowie Andy Warhol John Cale and Laurie Anderson track the deadpan wit street-smart
edge and poetic flights that defined his craft as a singer and songwriter with the Velvet
Underground and beyond and explore the artistic ambition and gift for self-sabotage he took
from his mentor Delmore Schwartz. As Hermes follows Reed from Lower East Side cold-water flats
to the landmark status he later achieved he also tells the story of New York City as a
cultural capital. The first biographer to draw on the New York Public Library's much-publicized
Reed archive Hermes employs the library collections the release of previously unheard
recordings and a wealth of recent interviews to give us a new Lou Reed-a pioneer in living and
writing about nonbinary sexuality and gender identity a committed artist who pursued beauty
and noise with equal fervor and a turbulent and sometimes truculent man whose emotional
imprint endures.
