American Smoke
Journeys to the End of the Light
Farrar Straus & Giroux · Print & ebook · April 15, 2014
The visionary writer Iain Sinclair turns his sights to the Beat Generation in America in his most epic journey yet "How best to describe Iain Sinclair?" asks Robert Macfarlane inThe Guardian.
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- Genres
- Literary Travel, Writers' Lives, Travel Writing
- Published
- Farrar Straus & Giroux, April 15, 2014
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The visionary writer Iain Sinclair turns his sights to the Beat Generation in America in his most epic journey yet "How best to describe Iain Sinclair?" asks Robert Macfarlane inThe Guardian. "A literary mud-larker and tip-picker? A Travelodge tramp (his phrase)? A middle-class dropout with a gift for bullshit (also his phrase)? A toxicologist of the twenty-first-century landscape? A historian of countercultures and occulted pasts?
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An intemperate WALL-E, compulsively collecting and compacting the city's textual waste? A psycho-geographer (from which term Sinclair has been rowing away ever since he helped launch it into the mainstream)? He's all of these, and more." Now, for the first time, the enigma that is Iain Sinclair lands on American shores for his long-awaited engagement with the memory-filled landscapes of the American Beats and their fellow travelers. A book filled with bad journeys and fated decisions,American Smokeis an epic walk in the footsteps of Malcolm Lowry, Charles Olson, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Gary Snyder, and others, heated by obsession (the Old West, volcanoes, Mexico) and enlivened by false memories, broken reports, and strange adventures. WithAmerican Smoke, Sinclair confirms his place as the most innovative of our chroniclers of the contemporary.
Literary Detours
Come here for
- literary travel with an essayist’s edge
- Sinclair’s serious, reflective prose
Expect
- layered, author-driven digressions
- a keepsake-like book you can revisit
Where it sits
| Literary Travel | 64% |
|---|---|
| Travel Writing | 55% |
| Writers' Lives | 26% |
Percentages are BookFrontier’s reading of the book.
Publisher categories
- Writers' Lives
- Authors
- Iain Sinclair
- Publisher
- Farrar Straus & Giroux
- Published
- April 15, 2014
- Format
- Print & ebook
- Reading lane
- Writers' Lives