Acid Novelist to Give Away Collection of Short Stories
Summary
" The collection--which includes interviews Fahey conducted with Ken Kesey and Timothy Leary and aborted fragments--was born of a troubled marriage, the strain of becoming a university English professor, despite intense stage fright, and copious quantities of LSD, which, he admits, "had to that point fueled nearly all of my fiction and creative nonfiction." They center, as does all satire, on social discontent--marital dispute, workplace monotony, avarice and lust, and with a heavy emphasis on Dogshit Park: "A haven," as he tells it, "for winos and druggies, in the rich, white student ghetto of Isla Vista," on the fringes of affluent UC-Santa Barbara campus, where Fahey spent his first two years of university." Fahey honed his craft within the graduate Professional Writing Program at USC, studying for two years under Hubert Selby, Jr. (Last Exit to Brooklyn) and further within University of Louisiana-Lafayette, where Ernest J. Gaines tolerated his on-paper antics with bemusement."The collection--which includes interviews Fahey conducted with Ken Kesey and Timothy Leary and aborted fragments--was born of a troubled marriage, the strain of becoming a university English professor, despite intense stage fright, and copious quantities of LSD, which, he admits, "had to that point fueled nearly all of my fiction and creative nonfiction." They center, as does all satire, on social discontent--marital dispute, workplace monotony, avarice and lust, and with a heavy emphasis on Dogshit Park: "A haven," as he tells it, "for winos and druggies, in the rich, white student ghetto of Isla Vista," on the fringes of affluent UC-Santa Barbara campus, where Fahey spent his first two years of university.Three of the stories involve the titular locale.