Literary Nonfiction. Art. Music. Kessler's lens is wide but his focus is sharp as he surveys, with clarity and fresh understanding, both famous and unsung figures of contemporary culture. Selected from more than thirty years of journalism, THE TOLSTOY OF THE ZULUS includes 55 essays on such diverse topics as the creative repercussions of September 11, the art of the letter, a trip to Disneyland, Google's Universal Library, the Watts Towers, Marlon Brando, Charles Manson, Bob Dylan, Luis Buñuel, J. D. Salinger, Romare Bearden, Philip Roth, Harry Belafonte, Edward Hopper, Thelonious Monk, Charles Bukowski, Saul Bellow and an array of other, less celebrated but equally remarkable players in the multifaceted cultural life of our times.

Author City: SANTA CRUZ, CA USA

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.

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Roberto Ontiveros @ the San Francisco Chronicle