American Smoke: Journeys to the End of the Light

• Book ID: 126915414
• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 6 MB
• Category: Standards

✦ Synopsis

Iain Sinclair looks to the open road and the Beat Generation in American Smoke.

The observant will notice that the dustcover for the new Iain Sinclair book is (when fully revealed) a fold-out map of North America. American Smoke is part travelogue of North America, part memoir of Sinclair’s engagements with the Beats, part pyschogeography familiar to long-time Sinclair readers. The map shows destinations documented in the book: Lawrence, Lowell, Vancouver, Los Angeles. To be strictly accurate, it should have had another map on the reverse – one of the UK. Much of the narrative recalls events that took place in England: in St Leonards and Hastings on the South Coast, in the London home of socialite Panna Grady, in Croydon. But being strictly accurate wouldn’t be Beat and wouldn’t be Sinclair.

Sinclair is a pusher, dealing readers substances that bring a rush of peculiar associations and half-real memories (yours or his, you can’t tell). He doesn’t inform you of the exact nature of the merchandise mixed to his own formulae (how much of it is pure, how much of it is cut) and it would just be too uncool to ask him. 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 Smoke is 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. With American Smoke, Sinclair confirms his place as the most innovative of our chroniclers of the contemporary.

✦ Subjects

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