Description
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 Bio
Stephen Kessler is a poet, prose writer, translator and editor. Born in Los Angeles in 1947, he received his BA in languages and literature from Bard College and an MA in literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz. He published his first essays and criticism in the early 1970s, and his reviews, columns, articles, features and interviews have appeared steadily since then in dozens of magazines and newspapers, chiefly in Northern California. He was the founding editor and publisher of the international journal Alcatraz (1979-1985) and of the Santa Cruz newsweekly The Sun (1986-1989). He has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Lambda Literary Award, and the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets for his translations of Luis Cernuda, and is the editor and principal translator of The Sonnets by Jorge Luis Borges. His recent books include NEED I SAY MORE? (El León Literary Arts, 2015), WHERE WAS I? (Greenhouse Review Press, 2015), the poetry collection SCRATCH PEGASUS (Swan Scythe Press, 2013), translations of Vicente Aleixandre, the essay collection THE TOLSTOY OF THE ZULUS (El León Literary Arts, 2011), and the novel THE MENTAL TRAVELER (Greenhouse Review Press, 2010).From 1999 through 2014 he was the editor of the award-winning literary newspaper The Redwood Coast Review. He lives in Santa Cruz.
Author City: SANTA CRUZ, CA USA