Conversations with Ken Kesey

Conversations with Ken Kesey PDF Author: Scott F. Parker
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1626741204
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Ken Kesey (1935–2001) is the author of several works of well-known fiction and other hard-to-classify material. His debut novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, was a critical and commercial sensation that was followed soon after by his most substantial and ambitious book, Sometimes a Great Notion. His other books, including Demon Box, Sailor Song, and two children's books, appeared amidst a life of astounding influence. He is maybe best known for his role as the charismatic and proto-hippie leader of the West Coast LSD movement that sparked “The Sixties,” as iconically recounted in Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. In the introduction to “An Impolite Interview with Ken Kesey,” Paul Krassner writes, “For a man who says he doesn't like to do interviews, Kesey certainly does a lot of them.” What's most surprising about this statement is not the incongruity between disliking and doing interviews but the idea that Kesey could possibly have been less than enthusiastic about being the center of attention. After his two great triumphs, writing played a lesser role in Kesey's life, but in thoughtful interviews he sometimes regrets the books that were sacrificed for the sake of his other pursuits. Interviews trace his arc through success, fame, prison, farming, and tragedy—the death of his son in a car accident profoundly altered his life. These conversations make clear Kesey's central place in American culture and offer his enduring lesson that the freedom exists to create lives as wildly as can be imagined.

Conversations with Ken Kesey

Conversations with Ken Kesey PDF Author: Scott F. Parker
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1626741204
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Get Book Here

Book Description
Ken Kesey (1935–2001) is the author of several works of well-known fiction and other hard-to-classify material. His debut novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, was a critical and commercial sensation that was followed soon after by his most substantial and ambitious book, Sometimes a Great Notion. His other books, including Demon Box, Sailor Song, and two children's books, appeared amidst a life of astounding influence. He is maybe best known for his role as the charismatic and proto-hippie leader of the West Coast LSD movement that sparked “The Sixties,” as iconically recounted in Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. In the introduction to “An Impolite Interview with Ken Kesey,” Paul Krassner writes, “For a man who says he doesn't like to do interviews, Kesey certainly does a lot of them.” What's most surprising about this statement is not the incongruity between disliking and doing interviews but the idea that Kesey could possibly have been less than enthusiastic about being the center of attention. After his two great triumphs, writing played a lesser role in Kesey's life, but in thoughtful interviews he sometimes regrets the books that were sacrificed for the sake of his other pursuits. Interviews trace his arc through success, fame, prison, farming, and tragedy—the death of his son in a car accident profoundly altered his life. These conversations make clear Kesey's central place in American culture and offer his enduring lesson that the freedom exists to create lives as wildly as can be imagined.

Conversations with Tom Wolfe

Conversations with Tom Wolfe PDF Author: Dorothy McInnis Scura
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9780878054275
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
Literary journalist, ""lowly social historian,"" ""chronicler of his times,"" and ""champion of realism"" are among the many epithets heaped upon Tom Wolfe by himself and his myriad admirers and critics. In this collection of interviews spanning his richly productive career, Wolfe is seen as a writer imitating no one and riding the crest of each latest wave in contemporary America. For more than a quarter of a century he has been the vivid and varied chronicler of our time--from the Californian car customizers and Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters of the sixties to the ambition-driven inhabitants of New York City in the eighties. His hybrid of reporting and fiction-writing has received perhaps more applause than any other literary journalism, and his first major work of fiction, Bonfire of the Vanities, rested at the top of the bestseller lists for more than a year. Here is Tom Wolfe talking--about the subjects of his eight books, about the writers he admires, about the discipline of writing, about his politics and his disposition to satire and parody. As he explains his attempt ""to show the world 'life in our times,'"" this collection of delightfully witty and informative interviews reveals the insights and the intellect of one of America's brightest and most appealing authors.

It’s All a Kind of Magic

It’s All a Kind of Magic PDF Author: Rick Dodgson
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres
ISBN: 0299295133
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
"The first biography of Kesey, [revealing] a youthful life of brilliance and eccentricity that encompassed wrestling, writing, farming, magic and ventriloquism, CIA-funded experiments with hallucinatory drugs, and a notable cast of characters that would come to include Wallace Stegner, Larry McMurtry, Tom Wolfe, Neal Cassady, Timothy Leary, the Grateful Dead, and Hunter S. Thompson"--Dust jacket flap.

The Revolution of Every Day

The Revolution of Every Day PDF Author: Cari Luna
Publisher: Tin House Books
ISBN: 1935639641
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 395

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Book Description
In the midnineties, New York’s Lower East Side contained a city within its shadows: a community of squatters who staked their claims on abandoned tenements and lived and worked within their own parameters, accountable to no one but each other. With gritty prose and vivid descriptions, Cari Luna’s debut novel, The Revolution of Every Day, imagines the lives of five squatters from that time. But almost more threatening than the city lawyers and the private developers trying to evict them are the rifts within their community. Amelia, taken in by Gerrit as a teen runaway seven years earlier, is now pregnant by his best friend, Steve. Anne, married to Steve, is questioning her commitment to the squatter lifestyle. Cat, a fading legend of the downtown scene and unwitting leader of one of the squats, succumbs to heroin. The misunderstandings and assumptions, the secrets and the dissolution of the hope that originally bound these five threaten to destroy their homes as surely as the city’s battering rams. The Revolution of Every Day shows readers a life that few people, including the New Yorkers who passed the squats every day, know about or understand.

Demon Box

Demon Box PDF Author: Ken Kesey
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0140085300
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
In this collection of short stories, Ken Kesey challenges public and private demons with a wrestler's brave and deceptive embrace, making it clear that the energy of madness must live on.

Sometimes a Great Notion

Sometimes a Great Notion PDF Author: Ken Kesey
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9780143039860
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 740

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Book Description
The magnificent second novel from the legendary author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest Following the astonishing success of his first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey wrote what Charles Bowden calls "one of the few essential books written by an American in the last half century." This wild-spirited tale tells of a bitter strike that rages through a small lumber town along the Oregon coast. Bucking that strike out of sheer cussedness are the Stampers. Out of the Stamper family's rivalries and betrayals Ken Kesey has crafted a novel with the mythic impact of Greek tragedy. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Caverns

Caverns PDF Author: O. U. Levon
Publisher: Penguin Group
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
"After serving six years in San Quentin, Charles Loach joined by his brother and two mystical sisters leads his troupe on a journey to revisit a cavern that Loach claims will change the archeological history of North America"--Amazon.

Conversations with Malcolm Cowley

Conversations with Malcolm Cowley PDF Author: Malcolm Cowley
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9780878052912
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
This collection of twenty-one unabridged interviews puts us immediately in the company of one of the presiding literary figures of our times. This revered editor, poet, literary historian, and critic encapsulates seven decades of American literature in these conversations that took place between 1942 and 1985. Full of insights and strong opinions, direct, salty, Cowley converses candidly with his interviewers about himself and about many subjects and personages that have shaped our national literature in the last century. Throughout this volume Cowley gives vivid accounts of his close alliances with such widely diverse and individual authors as William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Hart Crane, John Cheever, Jack Kerouac, and Ken Kesey. From these interviews emerges a literary man who inspires the reader's renewed admiration and gratitude. In the common bond uniting great authors Cowley sees the manifestation of a Republic of Letters with laws, intelligence, and confraternity. These magnificently articulate interviews leave little doubt that Cowley is its elder statesman.

Poisoner in Chief

Poisoner in Chief PDF Author: Stephen Kinzer
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company
ISBN: 1250140447
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
The bestselling author of All the Shah’s Men and The Brothers tells the astonishing story of the man who oversaw the CIA’s secret drug and mind-control experiments of the 1950s and ’60s. The visionary chemist Sidney Gottlieb was the CIA’s master magician and gentlehearted torturer—the agency’s “poisoner in chief.” As head of the MK-ULTRA mind control project, he directed brutal experiments at secret prisons on three continents. He made pills, powders, and potions that could kill or maim without a trace—including some intended for Fidel Castro and other foreign leaders. He paid prostitutes to lure clients to CIA-run bordellos, where they were secretly dosed with mind-altering drugs. His experiments spread LSD across the United States, making him a hidden godfather of the 1960s counterculture. For years he was the chief supplier of spy tools used by CIA officers around the world. Stephen Kinzer, author of groundbreaking books about U.S. clandestine operations, draws on new documentary research and original interviews to bring to life one of the most powerful unknown Americans of the twentieth century. Gottlieb’s reckless experiments on “expendable” human subjects destroyed many lives, yet he considered himself deeply spiritual. He lived in a remote cabin without running water, meditated, and rose before dawn to milk his goats. During his twenty-two years at the CIA, Gottlieb worked in the deepest secrecy. Only since his death has it become possible to piece together his astonishing career at the intersection of extreme science and covert action. Poisoner in Chief reveals him as a clandestine conjurer on an epic scale.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest PDF Author: Ken Kesey
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101209046
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
An international bestseller and the basis for the hugely successful film, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is one of the defining works of the 1960s. In this classic novel, Ken Kesey’s hero is Randle Patrick McMurphy, a boisterous, brawling, fun-loving rebel who swaggers into the world of a mental hospital and takes over. A lusty, life-affirming fighter, McMurphy rallies the other patients around him by challenging the dictatorship of Nurse Ratched. He promotes gambling in the ward, smuggles in wine and women, and openly defies the rules at every turn. But this defiance, which starts as a sport, soon develops into a grim struggle, an all-out war between two relentless opponents: Nurse Ratched, backed by the full power of authority, and McMurphy, who has only his own indomitable will. What happens when Nurse Ratched uses her ultimate weapon against McMurphy provides the story’s shocking climax. “BRILLIANT!”—Time “A SMASHING ACHIEVEMENT...A TRULY ORIGINAL NOVEL!”—Mark Schorer “Mr. Kesey has created a world that is convincing, alive and glowing within its own boundaries...His is a large, robust talent, and he has written a large, robust book.”—Saturday Review