Fug You: An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore, the Fuck You Press, the Fugs, and Counterculture in the Lower East Side (signed, first edition)

“Mr. Sanders, now 72 and living in Woodstock, N.Y., has described his 1960s in various ways over the years. His long bibliography includes a book of fictionalized stories (“Tales of Beatnik Glory”) and epic-historical verse according to the precepts of a technique he calls “Investigative Poetry.” (He published a manifesto about that too.)


“Fug You,” a book of more straightforward storytelling and documentation, may be the master source.

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. To some extent this is an old-school show-business gossip memoir that doesn’t want to waste your time, even as it discusses Egyptian glyphs and the C.I.A. (It has a funny tonal parallel, to, say Walter Winchell’s memoir, “Exclusive.”) Mr. Sanders is fond of subtitling each rat-a-tat vignette; deploys Mad magazine-style triple exclamation marks; and reprints many of his own words, from personal letters, screeds, news releases, and talk-show colloquy, including his appearance on William F. Buckley’s “Firing Line” alongside Jack Kerouac.” — New York Times Review

$ 125.00

Out of stock