I met Eliot Katz many years ago at St. Marks Poetry Project in New York City, back in a different era when several now legendary figures like Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Herbert Huncke, Tuli Kupferberg and Janine Pommy Vega were still alive and never missed a reading at St. Mark’s … Read the rest
One reason Vanessa Veselka is just about my favorite emerging novelist is that she studies anarchism and counterculture from the inside, allowing her stories to venture into the murky, manic, comic realms of intense political ideology — a dangerous territory that many novelists lack the courage or knowledge to enter. … Read the rest
When Bill Griffith was a 19-year-old art student at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, he ran into Marcel Duchamp at Manhattan gallery hosting a retrospective by the venerable Dadaist. When he told Duchamp that he, too, wanted to be an artist, the old man sternly warned, “Go into … Read the rest
(Last year’s big counterculture memoir was “Just Kids” by Patti Smith, and 2012’s might turn out to be “Fug You: An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore, the Fuck You Press, the Fugs, and Counterculture in the Lower East Side
“Imagine you have a friend name Rob,” says our instructor at the University of North Florida Writer’s Conference. “If you want to ask your friend a question, you might begin by saying, ‘So, Rob…’ and that is how to pronounce my first name.”
Sohrab Homi Fracis (“Fray-sis”) is the first … Read the rest
“Ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you’re really in the total animal soup of time …” — Allen Ginsberg, “Howl”
I’m proud to announce the publication of Beats In Time: A Literary Generation’s Legacy, a selection of the best eighteen pieces about … Read the rest
“It’s about persevering.” These words appear in a funny short video about the life of a writer starring Kristen J. Tsetsi, who proudly lives up to that spirit. Her novel Pretty Much True …, scheduled for publication in September, tells the story of a young couple separated by … Read the rest
Zazen
The story is narrated by Della, a recent college graduate with a degree in paleontology, who kills time learning yoga and working in a vegan restaurant while her country, a slightly twisted … Read the rest
(As a longtime Ramones fan, I was very moved by Mickey Leigh’s memoir about growing up as the younger brother of Joey Ramone, who died tragically of cancer in 2001. The book has just come out in paperback with a new epilogue. I was thrilled to have a chance to … Read the rest
