"Stunningly Sensual and Visceral"-- Groff's Arcadia

Janet Maslin is take by surprise by (and gives a rave review in the New York Times to) Lauren Groff's new novel. Groff visits this coming Tuesday, March 27th.

Lauren Groff’s “Arcadia” is so immersed in the life of a hippie commune that patchouli ought to waft off its pages. It’s a novel of the 1960s and ’70s in which acid is dropped, groats are served, “Froggie Went A Courtin’ ” is sung, a cult leader is worshiped and somebody literally hugs a tree. An outhouse at Arcadia smells like wet muskrat. Children are reared in a Kid Herd. This does not sound like everyone’s cup of rose-hip tea.

So the transporting magic of “Arcadia” comes as a surprise. Ms. Groff has taken a quaint, easily caricatured community and given it true universality, not just the knee-jerk kind that Arcadian platitudes espoused. Even more unexpectedly, she has expanded this period piece so that it stretches from 1965 to 2018, coaxing forth a remarkable amount of suspense from the way her characters change over time. And a book that might have been small, dated and insular winds up feeling timeless and vast. Full article.

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"Fug You" in the New York Times

Last May at the Writers Institute, Ed Sanders presented his then-unpublished memoir, an eyewitness account of the birth of the American Counterculture, Fug You: An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore, the F**k You Press, the Fugs, and Counterculture in the Lower East Side.

Capo Press published Fug You in December 2011.

Here's a review from Ben Ratliff in the New York Times:

"As a poet Mr. Sanders operates on joy, velocity, humor and catharsis, forcibly mushing bodies of knowledge together; he describes his literary persona in the ’60s as an 'anarcho-Egypto-Bacchic.' As a prose writer he’s pretty much the same, with extra mugging and contextualizing...." More.

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