Overview

Equal parts travelogue, cultural study, and picaresque autobiography, Brotherton's Travels is a probing and insightful book that challenges conventional perceptions. Having lived and worked in the United States, France, Ecuador, and Spain, Greg Boyd brings a border-crossing sensibility to his memoirs. Raised and educated in upstate New York during the early 1960s, then in the free-wheeling culture of 70s Southern California, Boyd's upbringing resulted in a highly developed sense of irony. Whether telling the story of his mysterious Brotherton ancestors or describing his experiences in small press publishing, teaching, and the arts, Boyd pulls back the curtain to reveal the absurdity hiding in plain sight. Having left Paradise, California prior to the conflagration that wiped it off the map, he remembers a town that no longer exists. Having grown up near the site of a series of nuclear accidents at the Santa Susana Research Laboratory in the city of Los Angeles, he now lives in the Spanish town on which the U.S. Air Force once dropped a handful of nuclear warheads. Whether describing conversations with a wandering peddler of psychedelics, a body-piercing expert, or a victim of serial alien abductions, or describing what it's like to catch a wave as a surfer, teach classes in Taekwondo, or be an expat, Boyd's memoirs are full of the inventiveness and explosiveness critics have praised in his fiction. The book concludes with ""Planet Hazmat,"" an alternative autobiographical narrative that examines the effects of environmental and cultural toxicity.

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9781587750540

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Reviews

Spanning three continents and half a century, Brotherton's Travels is the story of life on the edge, the proverbial struggle to make art matter in a world that works against it. Greg Boyd's work with Asylum Arts Press was nothing short of heroic, a lifeline for hundreds of innovative writers. But beyond that, Boyd's carefully crafted memoir is a portrait of a man unwilling to settle for a dull existence. As a poet, fiction-writer, editor, teacher, and visual artist, Boyd was an ongoing source of inspiration to people he worked with. And it's fitting that his memoir ends with ""Planet Hazmat,"" a stunning and insightful condemnation of the socio-economic forces that are turning our planet into a toxic waste land. Though Greg Boyd has a great absurdist sense of humor, Brotherton's Travels is not light reading. Instead, it's a book to read carefully, a book to savor and learn from. - Stephen-Paul Martin, author of TwentyTwenty and The Ace of Lightning If you're into contemporary literature and small press publishing, this splendid memoir is for you. In Brotherton's Travels, author and visual artist Greg Boyd details what it takes to swim against the current as a writer and publisher of avant-garde literature in America. I hope he's found his asylum at last. - Paul Rosheim, editor and publisher of Obscure Publications Greg Boyd is, like his great-great grandfather, ""a handsome, bold, and entertaining fellow."" Moreover, a headbanger of the first order, Boyd was Baudelaire in the battle scarred San Fernando Valley when the Left Coast renaissance was in its mid-century infancy. Boyd's memoir Brotherton's Travels recounts what earthlings now realize was the halcyon age of the boho California coup de foudre. Reading Greg Boyd's work makes me want to wave my hands and pound on the table. I can't get caught inside without him. - Susie Bright, author of Big Sex, Little Death: A Memoir

Author Information

Greg Boyd is a painter and print-maker as well as a writer and translator. His books include Water & Power, Carnival Aptitude, Modern Love and Other Tall Tales, The Double (Doppelangelgänger), and The Nambuli Papers, as well as the first English-language translation of French poet Charles Baudelaire's novella La Fanfarlo. Greg Boyd is a painter and print-maker as well as a writer and translator. His books include Water & Power, Carnival Aptitude, Modern Love and Other Tall Tales, The Double (Doppelangelgänger), and The Nambuli Papers, as well as the first English-language translation of French poet Charles Baudelaire's novella La Fanfarlo.

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