Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me (Penguin Twentieth-century Classics) - Softcover

Richard Fariña

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140189300 ISBN 13: 9780140189308

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 1996

Synopsis

A witty, psychedelic, and telling novel of the 1960s

Richard Fariña evokes the Sixties as precisely, wittily, and poignantly as F. Scott Fitzgerald captured the Jazz Age. The hero, Gnossus Pappadopoulis, weaves his way through the psychedelic landscape, encountering-among other things-mescaline, women, art, gluttony, falsehood, science, prayer, and, occasionally, truth.

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.

About this title

Review:

This is the ultimate novel of college life during the first hallucinatory flowering of what has famously come to be known as The Sixties. Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me follows haunted ur-hippy Gnossos Pappadopoulis upon return to his old university town that's just tilting into a new era, and Gnossos' involvement in a swirl of sixties-style drug taking and the search for love and the meaning of it all. It is a hilarious and haunting book.

About the Author:

Richard Fariña was killed in a motorcycle accident in Carmel, California, on April 30, 1966-two days after the publication of Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me. A posthumous collection of his writings, Long Time Coming and a Long Time Gone, was published in 1969.

Thomas Pynchon was born in Glen Cove, New York, in 1937. He is the author of The Crying of Lot 49, V., Vineland, Slow Learner, and Mason & Dixon, among other novels.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0140189300
• ISBN 13: 9780140189308
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352