“Make your lesson live, give it real life. Make your lesson pulse urgently. Make it like a dark animal darting through the snow…” –Giancarlo DiTrapano

Giancarlo DiTrapano (1971–2021), founder and editor of New York Tyrant and Tyrant Books, wrote about literature “the way a boxing coach chewing a cigar might talk about his prizefighters.”

Vices is a collection of essays and interviews culled from the VICE column Friday Tyrant, written by Gian during the late aughts and into early 2010s. Weekly, Gian introduced emerging writers, mythologized their work, and slowly turned his gaze on himself: the grind and excess of indie publishing, sex and friendship, lifelong cluster headaches, and the business of believing in books when no one else would.

From a drug-year dialogue with Tao Lin to a midtown masturbation crawl, a Best American takedown, and disarming Q&As with Blake Butler, Edmund White, Kendra Grant Malone, and the Brian Jonestown Massacre, the pieces in this book form an intimate, unruly portrait of a singular literary mind. Vices is not a comprehensive anthology, but rather a distillation that captures what Gian loved and loathed about writing, publishing, and life in his final New York years before decamping to Italy.

This limited edition paperback features introductions by writers/former VICE editors, Jonathan Smith and Thomas Morton.