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Charles Farrellhas spent his professional life moving between music and boxing, with occasional detours. He has managed five world champions, and has played and recorded with many of the musicians he most admires-Evan Parker and Ornette Coleman among them. His first book,(Low)life: A Memoir of Jazz, FIght-Fixing, and the Mob, was published by Hamilcar in 2021. Farrell lives outside of Boston.
Praise for (Low)life: A Memoir of Jazz, Fight-Fixing and the Mob “With deadpan humor, whip-smart insights and some damn fine sentences, Charles Farrell has written a classic chronicle of life in the twilight world, on par with masters of the genre like Damon Runyon, Mezz Mezzrow, Nat Hentoff and Nick Pileggi. A truly great read.”—Debby Applegate, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher, and author of Madam: The Life of Polly Adler, Icon of the Jazz-Age ""To scrape the heavens with your art, to plunge into the sordors of the world with your business: not even Charles Farrell can explain Charles Farrell. But he’s better qualified to try it than anybody else, and you owe it to yourself - I might even say it’s your duty as an American - to experience (Low)life. Elegant, unexpected, seeking always the real behind the real, Farrell’s prose hits like the precision fists of... blows like the wild trumpet of... I give up.""—James Parker, The Atlantic “This is a book people will be reading in years to come—like Claude Brown's Manchild in the Promised Land or Art Pepper's Straight Life or Jack Black's You Can't Win. I've devoured books about life on the margins since I was a kid, and I've read about as many of them as a human can get to, and I've never encountered a writer who knew that world as well as Charles Farrell and could match him for clear-eyed, unsentimental, shrewdly observed prose.”—Carlo Rotella, author of Cut Time and The World Is Always Coming to an End ""(Low)life is a protean, impossible, brilliant memoir by an exquisitely unique observer. Charles Farrell’s stories are fascinating, but it’s his failures, his missed opportunities and blown bets that truly transcend into magical, enthralling, and uplifting territory (and where his writing shines the brightest.) For while Farrell has been so many things—professional pianist, fight-fixer, gangster—he has arrived here, later in life, as an emotional and deeply insightful writer, and his book is a gift of observation, a Henry Miller-esque odyssey through the murky bottom of Americana."" —Sam Sheridan, author of The Fighter’s Mind, A Fighter’s Heart, and The Disaster Diaries, and creator of the TV series I Am The Night
