Overview

"Set against the backdrop of a generation awakening from its countercultural dreams to the realities of a materialistic society, WannaBeat is an incisive and provocative novel about yearning for authenticity in the face of an increasingly artificial reality. Living in San Francisco in the late 1970s, Philip Polarov is a writer scraping by on a series of odd jobs while attempting to turn his self-described ""stream of drivel"" into an Important Novel. As the last soldiers of the Beat Generation become ghosts in the North Beach neighborhood they put on the map and the Baby Beats, a new clique of their acolytes, take over the bars and coffeehouses, Philip searches for meaning, sex, drugs ... and an affordable place to crash. Clinging to his idealism in a world of upward mobility and status seeking while worrying about his accomplished brother's life-threatening illness, Philip scribbles his way across San Francisco bohemia in search of collaborators in a new Beat movement as he tries to win the heart of the cocaine-fueled hostess at the trendy restaurant where he is a dishwasher. Failing that, Philip throws himself into the SF punk rock scene, joining the crowds pogoing at the Mabuhay and befriending some of the infamous bands that play there. Yet even this newfound comradeship in rebelliousness cannot thwart his economic reality: on the verge of eviction from his writer's garret, Philip must decide if his struggle to ""resist the system"" is a heroic quest ... or a ruse to avoid facing his inescapable place within it."

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David Polonoff vividly captures a time and place, San Francisco in the '70s - some of the same territory visited by Jennifer Egan's A Visit From the Goon Squad. -Joel Selvin, author and journalist (San Francisco Chronicle) This riveting book joins George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London and Henry Miller's The Paris Years on the shelf of the timeless call of bohemia to fascinated young dreamers. -Andrei Codrescu, editor of The Stiffest of the Corpse (City Lights Books) Attention all Kerouac/Beat Generation fans: BEFORE you try to move to San Francisco's North Beach, Read This Book first! Then, all bets are off! -V. Vale, RE/Search and Search & Destroy founder Pass-the-potatoes fiction, with no scrimp in the starch. Genuwine, authentic. GIMME GIMME SPUDS, JACK! -Richard Meltzer, author of A Whore Like All the Rest

Author Information

David Polonoff is a writer and chronicler of bohemia, having participated in most of the countercultural movements of the last 50 years while earning degrees in philosophy from Yale and NYU. His satrical writng on culture and politcs appeared regularly in the Village Voice, East Village Eye and New York Newsday in the 1980s/early '90s and was later collected in the book Down the Yup Staircase. In 2014 he started the YouTube channel Big Bad Boris, writng and performing in comedy videos that garnered over 100k views. Born in New Haven, Connecticut and spending his formatve years in Portland and San Francisco, he is adept in the culture of both coasts, though he currently prefers to live in New York.

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