Men's Adventure Library editors Bob Deis and Wyatt Doyle join Nick Anderson of The Book Graveyard to discuss The MAL's many releases and talk all things MAM!
The Graveyard is home to a lively, informed audience, so click WATCH ON YOU TUBE. Once you're there, be sure to select SHOW CHAT REPLAY to follow the comments and questions posted by viewers during the livestream.
Thanks very much to Grounds Keeper Nick and all who joined the conversation!
I wrote Attaché Case for several reasons. First, I felt that people outside the walled garden of foreign affairs didn’t really understand what diplomats did, or the culture of the State Department as an organization. I wanted to get that across. There are many good books by military veterans—what they did in the armed forces, what it felt like, how the institution worked—but that granularity of experience was missing from many of the books I read by former diplomats. Maybe it’s because the field draws people with a habit of discretion, which it is hard to give up. Second, I had a bunch of stories I thought were funny or poignant or revelatory about American power over the last 30 years, and its projection. I wanted to get those out. Finally, as a lifelong celebrity-watcher, I wanted to chase down this notion of the US as the celebrity nation, as the place no one can avoid having to think about, witness, have an opinion about. I wanted to trace the arc of this from the end of the Cold War into the first Trump Administration.
When I was in college and figuring out what to do for a career, I thought the Foreign Service sounded interesting: I liked politics, I liked travel, I liked writing, I liked intrigue. I was a news junkie and I have an ear for languages. My whole life I’ve had dyscalculia, where I mix up numbers and cannot grasp fairly basic mathematical concepts, but I’ve got a steel-trap memory when it comes to country names, flags, and capitals. I can use the subjunctive. This was my modest and esoteric skill set. I was too into creature comforts for the Peace Corps, but also too gay and way too chatty for the CIA. This left the US Foreign Service.
I had known about diplomats from childhood. In 1977, the US diplomat who lived a few doors down killed his family. Two of his sons had been on my swim team. A manhunt ensued, but he vanished forever. It was the first press stakeout I ever saw. A couple years later, the US embassy in Teheran was taken over by Iranian college students, who held fifty or so American diplomats hostage for 400+ days. This story on the news every night, with footage of the US Embassy, now covered in anti-US graffiti.
Still, I was hazy about what diplomats actually did. By the time I was in college, I’d worked at a city newspaper, so I understood what reporters and editors did during the day. One summer I interned at IBM, so I got, in the vague way of someone with math anxiety, what engineers were doing at the office and in labs. But diplomats? I knew they were discreet in an ostentatious way. Unless they were Henry Kissinger, they made a virtue out of their unobtrusiveness. I knew they rarely said what they meant or meant what they said, and that insincerity was an idiom, a tool. Being a diplomat seemed like more of a mood, a role, a status, an expert glide across wars, cultures, time zones, languages. There was something enigmatic there, and as de Chirico said, “What do I love if not the enigma?”
.jpg)
When I was a junior in college I saw the movie The Third Man. It’s a terrific story, beautifully shot, but the real takeaway for me was this minor character, Mr. Crabbin, who’s a cultural attaché. Here it was, at last, the diplomat at work, talky and distracted and opinionated as I was. Unlike, say, Dean Acheson, this was someone who was relatable. And here he was at work, running a speaker program on the Western genre of novel in postwar Vienna. He was occupying the liminal zone between his country and another, navigating a furrow full of hazard and ambiguity and promise. He seemed to have a lot of leeway. It looked fun.
Was this still a thing people did? I knew about the Alliance Française from my French studies and found out that, yes, the US too had a cultural and press service at our embassies and consulates. Every autumn, the State Department offered the Foreign Service exam, so, based on this character I saw in a movie and a tendency to imagine myself in faraway places (Port Moresby, Algiers, Vladivostok, anywhere but here, really), I took it. I passed the test and joined, again with only the vaguest notion of what I would be doing, other than acting discreet and organizing lectures.
Over the next three decades, I figured it out. More people became aware of what diplomats do. There was Richard Holbrooke, wrangler of Balkan dictators, who was in the Kissinger mode of self-promoter, never more comfortable than when in a room of reverential journalists. There were the embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya. There were the celebrity ambassadors: Shirley Temple Black, Pamela Harriman, Caroline Kennedy.
But when people with normal jobs, like baker or management consultant or oral surgeon or florist, would ask what it was I did, and I told them, they seemed surprised. It was odd because if they were Americans, they were, as taxpayers, paying my salary. There was a general bafflement about the culture. This even went for new Foreign Service Officers. When I spoke to them they often seemed a little taken aback, puzzled by the culture of the State Department. They were usually less, uh, florid than I was, but they had, in their way, been just as fanciful.
End of part one.
© 2025 Todd Pierce; all rights reserved
Attaché Case: Backstage at the Embassy is available in hardcover, softcover, and ebook editions. Click HERE to buy on Amazon.
Reissuing Lawrence Block's long-lost work for men's adventure magazines in the Men's Adventure Library collection The Naked and the Deadly is a milestone for the series, and a considerable source of great pride for us.
We had two primary goals for the project: First, to issue Block's work in the kind of deluxe presentation it deserves. Second, to try to ensure that the book's sticker price would allow anyone who wants to read the book the opportunity to own a copy—even readers on tighter budgets.
So we issued the book in multiple editions: A deluxe signed and numbered hardcover, and a deluxe (unsigned) hardcover, both printed in full color and packed with supplementary history, context, and illustrations.
We also put together a relatively no-frills ebook edition, and a compact mass market paperback edition—both focused on the stories alone.
But we are so wild about the hardcover presentations, we decided to issue another edition: a softcover that (mostly) replicates the contents and design of the hardcovers: a deluxe softcover edition.
Priced at $29.95 for a big 368 color pages, it's $16 less than the hardcover, but includes everything that's in the hardcover—minus the hardcover's bonus story.
It's been available for a while now. The problem is, many of our readers buy our books from Amazon, and Amazon doesn't seem to know what to do with a title that's been released in two softcover editions—despite the many differences between those softcover editions. Even searching for the deluxe softcover on Amazon can be a frustrating experience.
So, here's a direct link to the deluxe softcover on Amazon: https://amzn.to/41W23fl
Of course, copies are always available from the book's co-editor Bob Deis via his webstore at MensPulpMags.com. Bob often offers deals and discounts on all our books there, and he's always glad to sign or personalize books on request. Order directly from Bob by clicking HERE.
Now, please feel free to get Naked!
"The Kitchen Confidential of the State Department."
"Denial and minimizing are at least 50 percent of diplomacy, and as a gay man raised Catholic in Connecticut, I had those skills down pat."
You've seen them on the news, looking competent and concerned in their navy suits. They're in Beijing, Riyadh, Nairobi, Geneva, and of course Washington, DC. They look uneasy on camera. When they speak (which is as little as possible), it's with caution, hemmed in by protocol and the fear of causing an incident.
These are the diplomats.
Opening up a famously tight-lipped profession, 25-year State Department veteran Todd Pierce takes you backstage at the embassy, sharing what it's like to serve as a working-level diplomat.
Pierce traces his postings around the world, and tells what goes on backstage at the embassy. Sure, there are clashes over policy, but there’s also a visit to a Turkish supermax to visit a detained friend, a career near-death experience on the Acropolis, and a testy exchange, in Rangoon, about the Oscars. There are gaffes galore (usually his own) as he navigates the error-prone translation of one culture for another. There is public diplomacy, illustrated by Tom of Finland.
Find out what a working-level diplomat does every day, and what happens, come evening, at receptions. (Do they really serve Ferrero Rocher chocolates?) What does the US have in common with celebrities? How does the dance between reporters and flacks work, exactly? And what on earth is a minister extraordinary and plenipotentiary?
Funny, revealing, pointed, and deeply human, Attaché Case tells what it feels like to represent the celebrity country-the US-a place everyone thinks they know and has an opinion about.
This is how your diplomacy gets made.
Click HERE to preview a section from the book on Todd's Substack.
Attaché Case: Backstage at the Embassy is available in hardcover, softcover, and ebook editions. Click HERE to buy on Amazon.
(click image to enlarge)
The Washington Post's Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic Michael Dirda has singled out our new edition of Weasels Ripped My Flesh! as one of his holiday gift recommendations for 2024.
We also appreciated this "rule" posted at the head of his list:
"When possible, avoid buying titles from the bestseller lists. This shows a lack of imagination. If you’ve ever gone to a 'pick-your-own' farm, you know that the sweetest strawberries aren’t those on top of the plant in full sun, but those nestled in the shade of the leaves. You just have to search a little to find them."
We couldn't agree more. Thank you, Mr. Dirda.
Read Dirda's column in full HERE on the Post's site.
Edited by Robert Deis and Wyatt Doyle with Josh Alan Friedman, the new edition of Weasels Ripped My Flesh! is part of the Men's Adventure Library series, and is available now in softcover and hardcover editions. Get it from Amazon HERE.
AZ: "Jason, aka Stanley, (aka) JZ, SZ, SJZ... Do you ever answer to Mary Lou Retton?"
SJZ: "She's never called."
New Texture's Stanley J. Zappa, in conversation with his cousin Ahmet Zappa on Ahmet's Rocktails podcast.
Stanley's New Texture releases include the recordings Sing-Song Songs, Live a Little by Manzappaczewski, Crossing Guards by Carter, Leffue, Sikora, and Zappa The Stanley J. Zappa Quarter Plays for the Society of Women Engineers, Turkey Bacon Donuts Bitches by MANZAP REBORN, Free/Refuse by Hall/Skrowaczewski/Zappa, and the book Stop Requested, with Wyatt Doyle.
“My highest recommendation.”
A primary goal of our Men’s Adventure Library series is to spotlight great and under-sung writers from the MAM era and reintroduce them to contemporary readers of hard-boiled adventure fiction.
So reviews from those who make a career of writing fiction can be particularly meaningful to us, and writer/critic/New York Times bestselling author James Reasoner’s praise for our new edition of Weasels Ripped My Flesh! is very much appreciated.
"It’s one of the most beautifully produced books I’ve ever seen, with more cover reproductions and interior illustrations, better printing, full color, and updated and expanded articles and story introductions.
"I’ll be honest with you, I was just going to skim through this new edition and read the updated material, but time and again, I found myself stopping to reread and enjoy all over again some of the stories."
Read Reasoner’s full review on his Rough Edges blog, HERE.
Edited by Robert Deis and Wyatt Doyle with Josh Alan Friedman, the new edition of Weasels Ripped My Flesh! is part of the Men's Adventure Library series, and is available now in softcover and hardcover editions. Get it from Amazon HERE.