Fiction. At the dark end of the 1960s, a young poet is launched on a bizarre odyssey that leads him from the ill-fated gathering of rock-and-roll tribes at Altamont through San Francisco City Prison to various psychiatric hospitals up and down California in search of his role in the Revolution. An anti-nostalgic, at times terrifying, often comical exploration of a period largely misremembered in the collective imagination, this picaresque narrative is a vivid evocation of a tumultuous moment in American cultural history, an intimate account of acute psychosis, and an archetypal tale of artistic initiation.

Author Hometown: SANTA CRUZ, CA USA



About the author: Stephen Kessler is the author of eight previous books and chapbooks of original poetry, fourteen books of literary translation, a collection of essays, MOVING TARGETS, and a novel. He was a founding editor and publisher of Alcatraz, an international journal, and The Sun, a Santa Cruz newsweekly, among other periodicals and independent publishing ventures. He received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Lambda Literary Award for his translation of WRITTEN IN WATER: THE COLLECTED PROSE POEMS of Luis Cernuda, is a four-time winner of the California Library Association's PR Excellence Award for The Redwood Coast Review, the quarterly literary newspaper he founded and has edited since 1999, and was principal translator of The Sonnets by Jorge Luis Borges.

Reviews:
http://www.stephenkessler.com/