Drunken Angel by Alan Kaufman
Alan Kaufman has been compared to Jack Kerouac, Henry Miller, Hubert Selby Jr., even Ernest Hemmingway-his life reads so much like a great movie that the world of cinema has just optioned his first memoir, Jew Boy, for a feature film. Drunken Angel, his new autobiographical work, drops like a sledgehammer. It is the most gripping, chilling and inspiring account ever written of a life-long battle with alcoholism and the struggle to write. Graphic in its grit, an education in pain, Drunken Angel is being hailed as 'the Naked Lunch of memoirs. 'The book chronicles Kaufman's headlong plunge into the piratical life of a literary drunk, and takes us shamelessly through noirish alleyways of S&M sensuality, forbidden pleasures and pitfalls of adultery, the thrilling horrors of war, plus raging poetry nights, mental illness, homelessness, literary struggle and his strange, magnificent rise into a sobriety of personal triumph as crazily improbable as the famous and notorious figures he meets along the way. Drunken Angel contains revealing portraits of such literary figures as Allen Ginsberg, Kathy Acker, Barney Rosset, Anthony Burgess, Elie Wiesel, Ron Kolm, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Jim Feast, Bernard Malamud, Hubert Selby Jr., Bob Holman, Sapphire, not to speak of the gutter dreamers, Nuyorican Poets, Unbearables, Babarians, Slammers, Black foot Indians, commandos, criminals, junkies, renegade cocktail waitresses, hoboes, painters, and a host of others who each in some way, big or small, play their part in peopling the wildly exilerating drama of Kaufman's passionate and exotic life. Whether the addiction be booze, women, violence, writing or fame, Kaufman honors us with an explicit honesty that only a writer of enormous power and artistic greatness can attain, and his life, as Drunken Angel poignantly shows, is a profoundly meaningful quest for truth and spiritual values.Little, Brown and Company published Alan Kaufman's novel Matches in the fall of 2005. Matches has been termed an astonishing war novel by David Mamet, and Dave Eggers has said that it contains more passion than twenty other works combined. Kaufman's highly praised memoir, Jew Boy (Fromm/Farrar, Straus and Giroux), has been published in three editions in the United States and the United Kingdom, in hardback and paperback. Kaufman is also the award-winning editor of many anthologies, the most recent of which, The Outlaw Bible of American Literature, was recently featured on the cover of the New York Times Book Review. The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry and The Outlaw Bible of American Essays are the next two books in Kaufman's Outlaw anthology series. He has taught at the Academy of Art University's graduate and undergraduate schools, as well as writing workshops in San Francisco.
Salon, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, Partisan Review, and The San Francisco Examiner have all published his work. Kaufman's work has been frequently anthologized, most recently in WW Norton's Nothing Makes You Free: Essays From Holocaust Survivors Descendants. Kaufman is a PEN American Center member. Kaufman's archives and writings are housed in the University of Delaware's Special Collections Library, and he is included in the Europa Biographical Reference Series.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781936740321 |
| ISBN 10 | 193674032X |
| Title | Drunken Angel |
| Author | Alan Kaufman |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Viva Editions |
| Year published | 2013-04-09 |
| Number of pages | 464 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |