The Story of Junk

A downtown New York classic about heroin and art, reissued for the first time.

Linda Yablonsky’s classic novel The Story of Junk is a gripping tour through downtown New York’s art and music world of the 1980s, with detours to Naples, Bangkok, and more. We follow the narrator from her start working at a bar until she falls deeper and deeper into the world of heroin along with her rock musician girlfriend, using and then selling, with all the easy money and hard consequences that entails. 

Taut and gripping, but also a slyly funny, The Story of Junk is a ground-level look into another world, one that has passed into legend in the years since. But while the mythology of 1980s NYC may be reaching a peak, Yablonsky shows that beneath that gritty glamour, aspiring artists were working the same gritty jobs, chasing the same dreams and pleasures, with the same no-way-out conundrums as ever.