*This title is on pre-sale. Ships late summer 2025

Hardcover, 300 pages
6 in. x 9 in. | 15.24 cm. x 22.86 cm.
Original cover art and interior illustrations by Jess Rotter

Thinking Out Loud by Harper Simon is an invitation to the world’s liveliest dinner party. 

In interviews with legendary figures such as Harry Dean Stanton, Anjelica Huston, Sean Baker, Buck Henry, Eric Idle, Natasha Lyonne, and many others, Simon covers politics, music, religion, painting, the arts, love and death—and everything in between. 

His interviews with Mark Mothersbaugh, film composer and founding member of Devo ("You must whip it"), artist Tracey Emin, the futurist Jaron Lanier, former CIA director James Woolsey, actor and comedian Fred Armisen, and British journalist and editor Andrew Cockburn are all worth the price of admission.

With warmth, humor, and a talent for drawing out his subjects, Simon asks the unexpected question. His friendships with many of the people in these collected interviews make the reading feel as if you are sitting down at the kitchen table with his subjects, listening in as they talk about their astonishing lives.

Abundant with fascinating stories, Thinking Out Loud takes us deep into the American id, highlighting actual conversations, full of wit and insight, and even the occasional testiness that comes with genuine talk between real people.

The whole collection is a penetrating look into the people and forces that shaped much of contemporary American life. Anyone in the future (or the unfortunate present) who wants to know what life was like over the last decades of the 20th century and the earliest years of this one, needs to open Thinking Out Loud, a future banned book if ever there was one. 

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Harper Simon is an American singer, songwriter, and musician. Meditations on Crime, his previous book on Hat & Beard Press, is available now.