Photo by Lorna DooneNick Tosches is the author of In the Hand of Dante, Hellfire, Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams, The Devil and Sonny Liston, Trinities, and numerous other books, poems and articles, some of which have been collected in the 30-year retrospective anthology, The Nick Tosches Reader. On Friday September 9th, Nick Tosches will give a rare in-person reading after-hours in the main reading room of the Jefferson Market Branch Library in celebration of his new release on Kicks Books Save the Last Dance for Satan. Doors open at 8pm.

NYPL: According to Conversations with Ernest Hemingway, Hemingway wrote a strict average of 500 words per day despite his penchant for guzzling Mojitos, what are your writing habits?

Days, weeks, months go by without writing. Then, when I get down to it, I work seven days a week, day and night at stretches of from five to eighteen hours. I don't take breaks, because if I do it's almost impossible for me to get back to it. For me Mojitos don't enter into the picture. I don't know if I've ever even had one. The best advice Hemingway offered to any writer wasn't about writing-schedules. It was: "Posterity can take care of herself."

How was your interest in Dante and The Divine Comedy first cultivated?

It goes back so long that I can't remember. I seem to recall that when I was a little kid, there was a slightly incorrect quotation in translation from Dante on the wall in the bar where my old man worked in Newark: "Abandon all hope, you who enter." Later Dante and The Divine Comedy came to represent to me the noble but always ultimately futile quest for perfection—to come so close, but to never achieve it. Ezra Pound said it all when he said: "I have tried to write Paradise // Do not move / Let the wind speak /  that is paradise." Everything I came to know and feel about Dante ended up in my novel In the Hand of Dante.

What’s the deal with your new book Save The Last Dance for Satan?

Some years back, I wrote a piece for Vanity Fair that they titled “Confessions of an Opium-Seeker,” which was subsequently published as a little book called The Last Opium Den. Not long after the opium story came out, I had a piece in Vanity Fair that they titled "Hipsters and Hoodlums." It was about the underworld of the record industry in the late fifties and early sixties. I had long wanted to make a little book from this piece as well, the difference being that I wanted to expand and add new material to this one, and to reinstate a lot of what was censored from the magazine piece. Then along came Miriam Linna and her new venture, Kicks Books, and we rubbed two sticks together. Thus Save the Last Dance for Satan. Just as "The Last Opium Den" had been my original title for that Vanity Fair piece, "Save the last Dance for Satan" had been my original title for this one.

Do you ever write poems or stories that you don’t intend to ever publish—just writing for the sake of writing and not financial reasons?

Yes. A lot of them. Sometimes, years later, they do end up getting published. Samuel Johnson was right when he said: “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.” But, as my own life has repeatedly shown, I am often a blockhead, or worse.

What are you reading right now?

The Blunderer by Patricia Highsmith. I came to her late, only little more than a year ago. The last one I read by her was The Price of Salt. She's remarkable.

What are you working on now?

A novel that seems at times to be a work of madness. I'm in the home-stretch now, and hope to get to the end without going crazy again. This is the only one I've written that's scared even me, that's shocked even me with what's come out of me: like, Oh, God, I can't write that for other eyes to see. I really don't want to reveal more at this point, not even the title. Little, Brown should be bringing it out late next year.