Now Dig This: The Unspeakable Writings of Terry Southern, 1950-1995 - Softcover

Southern, Terry

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802138942 ISBN 13: 9780802138941

Publisher: Grove Press, 2002

Synopsis

Acclaimed novelist, Beat godfather, prolific screenwriter, and one of the founders of New Journalism, as well as the only guy to wear shades on the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's cover, Terry Southern was an audacious original. Now Dig This is a journey through Terry Southern's America, from the buttoned-down '50s through the sexual revolution, rock 'n' roll, and independent cinema (which he helped inaugurate by cowriting and producing Easy Rider), up to his death in 1995. It spans Southern's stellar career, from early short stories and a Paris Review interview with Henry Green, to his legendary Esquire piece covering the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention with Jean Genet and William Burroughs and his equally infamous account of life neck-high in girls and cocaine aboard The Rolling Stones' tour jet, to his memories of twentieth-century legends like Abbie Hoffman, Kurt Vonnegut, and Stanley Kubrick, with whom he wrote Dr. Strangelove. "A voice electric with street rhythm and royal with offhand intellection ... stuffed with strange and silken scraps." -- Troy Patterson, Entertainment Weekly "The subterranean Texan's finest moments are exquisite reads ... like a hot poker in the eye of conventional narrative." -- A. D. Amorosi, Philadelphia City Paper "The range of writing ... [was] as lethal as Mailer claimed and still awaiting the attention it deserves." -- Charles Taylor, Newsday "... reveals a writer defined by his generosity, by the pursuit of fun and by an insatiable ... literary appetite...." -- Claire Dederer, The New York Times Book Review

About this title

About the Author:

Co-editor, Nile Southern, runs the estate at TerrySouthern.comCo-editer, Josh Alan Friedman, can be found at BlackCracker.fm

From Publishers Weekly:

With this outstanding, volatile m‚lange of short pieces, Nile Southern repositions his father "the conduit between the Beatles and the Beats" as a Class Four hurricane in the Hipster Pantheon. Labeled "the Mt. Rushmore of modern American humor" by Saturday Night Live head writer Michael O'Donoghue (who hired him), Southern (1924-1995) is best remembered for his Oscar-nominated screenplays (Easy Rider; Dr. Strangelove) and novels (Candy; The Magic Christian). He also unleashed assorted anarchic articles, reviews (in the Nation), short stories and photo captions (Virgin: A History of Virgin Records, his last book). The opening interview from 1986 is followed by four stories that animate characters via expressive, askew vernacular. Letters to Lenny Bruce and George Plimpton, plus a hilarious commentary on female orgasms mailed to Ms. in 1972, are included. The famed pie-throwing sequence deleted by Kubrick from Dr. Strangelove is described in detail in "Strangelove Outtake: Notes from the War Room." Southern's sharp Esquire piece on the 1968 Chicago police attacks on protesters remains potent. Affectionate portraits of pranksters, poets and friends Plimpton, Maurice Girodias, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Abbie Hoffman, Vonnegut, Frank O'Hara make the closing pages sparkle. Readers will be grateful to Nile Southern for unearthing Terry's "unclassifiable schools of literary invention" from mini-storage for this variegated, entertaining book. (June 1)Forecast: Psychedelic cover art angles full-tilt towards the target audience. Arriving four months after Lee Hill's biography of Southern (HarperCollins), this is promoted at www.terrysouthern.com, a site that suggests there is more material forthcoming.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0802138942
• ISBN 13: 9780802138941
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272
• Editor: Southern Nile, Friedman Josh Alan