Here are 66 books that Trout Fishing In America fans have personally recommended if you like
Trout Fishing In America.
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As a degreed socio-linguist and international educator, my novel writing has been immersed in the human experience that began early on as a teen musician immersed naively in a non-mainstream world of creatives and cons, when the word 'counterculture' was perceived more as a renaissance than the drug-laden world of darker gatherings that it later came to be known as. Boulder Blues is a work of fiction drawn from both fantasy and personal exposure. From there I went on to teach in American alternative education and later at university with a focus on rhetoric and forensic writing. My draw to other cultures and their perspectives moved me to go on to teach internationally.
This American classic by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, Larry McMurtry, is read by university students worldwide. It’s set in its own time of indulgent decadence where little value is placed on the lives of individuals met by Danny Deck, the sad-sack protagonist, who denigrates his published work to the point of tearing up a copy of the novel he carries with him before drowning his own sorry self in the river of the Rio Grande. Yet, Danny is as much at fault for the sloppy treatment of the company he keeps as his company is for being disingenuous.
What McMurtry calls normal life, or mundane happiness, through the voice of novelist Deck, is seen as obtainable if one wants to pursue the creative arts. His conclusion is that the two simply don’t mix. As he explores this idea in a higgledy-piggledy fashion, Deck sets about self-destructing, which has nothing to do…
Hailed as one of "the best novels ever set in America's fourth largest city" (Douglas Brinkley, New York Times Book Review), All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers is a powerful demonstration of Larry McMurtry's "comic genius, his ability to render a sense of landscape, and interior intellection tension" (Jim Harrison, New York Times Book Review). Desperate to break from the "mundane happiness" of Houston, budding writer Danny Deck hops in his car, "El Chevy," bound for the West Coast on a road trip filled with broken hearts and bleak realities of the artistic life. A cast of unforgettable…
As a degreed socio-linguist and international educator, my novel writing has been immersed in the human experience that began early on as a teen musician immersed naively in a non-mainstream world of creatives and cons, when the word 'counterculture' was perceived more as a renaissance than the drug-laden world of darker gatherings that it later came to be known as. Boulder Blues is a work of fiction drawn from both fantasy and personal exposure. From there I went on to teach in American alternative education and later at university with a focus on rhetoric and forensic writing. My draw to other cultures and their perspectives moved me to go on to teach internationally.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s son, Mark, wrote this semi-fictional exploratory piece in an autobiographical style while exploring the nature of drug-induced madness coupled with undiagnosed schizophrenia while living an alternative lifestyle in a working commune. Through it all, the nature of humanity is questioned in a humorously chaotic way. And yet he pulls it all together to somehow not only make sense of, but also be enlightened by, the madness of this counterculture lifestyle.
Mark Vonnegut later returns to university and obtains a medical degree while exploring the use of orthomolecular medicine as a treatment to combat schizophrenia. While successfully obtaining his medical degree, he eventually disavows orthomolecular therapy as a plausible treatment.
“One of the best books about going crazy . . . required reading for those who want to understand insanity from the inside.”—The New York Times Book Review
Mark Vonnegut set out in search of Eden with his VW bug, his girlfriend, his dog, and his ideals. But genetic predisposition and “a whole lot of **** going down” made Mark Vonnegut crazy in a culture that told him “mental illness is a myth” and “schizophrenia is a sane response to an insane society.” Here he tells his story with the eyes that see from the inside out: a moving remembrance…
As a degreed socio-linguist and international educator, my novel writing has been immersed in the human experience that began early on as a teen musician immersed naively in a non-mainstream world of creatives and cons, when the word 'counterculture' was perceived more as a renaissance than the drug-laden world of darker gatherings that it later came to be known as. Boulder Blues is a work of fiction drawn from both fantasy and personal exposure. From there I went on to teach in American alternative education and later at university with a focus on rhetoric and forensic writing. My draw to other cultures and their perspectives moved me to go on to teach internationally.
Coining an era of "sorry stuff of troubled times," The New Yorker calls this autobiography of journalist/fiction writer Didion’s a timely and elegant collection. Yet, it could also be seen as a culmination of depressing flashbacks to a scarier time of a seedier side of the ‘60s - ‘70s, when broken taboos of post-WWII boomers led to not only drug-induced spirituality and experimentation, but also depraved moralities and violent behaviours. The author relives personal experiences of friendships with others once close to key figures who had near escapes from encounters with the likes of the Manson Family and Black Panthers.
Joan Didion's hugely influential collection of essays which defines, for many, the America which rose from the ashes of the Sixties.
We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea.
In this now legendary journey into the hinterland of the American psyche, Didion searches for stories as the Sixties implode. She waits for Jim Morrison to show up, visits the Black Panthers in prison, parties with Janis Joplin and buys dresses with Charles Manson's girls. She and her reader emerge, cauterized, from…
As a degreed socio-linguist and international educator, my novel writing has been immersed in the human experience that began early on as a teen musician immersed naively in a non-mainstream world of creatives and cons, when the word 'counterculture' was perceived more as a renaissance than the drug-laden world of darker gatherings that it later came to be known as. Boulder Blues is a work of fiction drawn from both fantasy and personal exposure. From there I went on to teach in American alternative education and later at university with a focus on rhetoric and forensic writing. My draw to other cultures and their perspectives moved me to go on to teach internationally.
Voguepraises this as a "magnificent portrait of an American family on the brink" by painting a story of a typical 1970’s family that is influenced by the challenging morals of the time. Exploiting a generational perspective that the breaking of old taboos leads to a better world, this novel drags out tired themes of egoistic flirtation and personal searches for fulfillment to the detriment of others involved, such as the family unit.
The mother of the story is perhaps the only sympathetic character waking up to the fact that she’s buried herself in calories while avoiding truths she has a hard time facing as she attempts to reshape her being through a more pleasing physical self. The husband, on the other hand, is a failed contemporary minister in love with another one of his parishioners. Without facing up to his own moral shortcomings, he instead justifies his own motives…
Jonathan Franzen’s gift for wedding depth and vividness of character with breadth of social vision has never been more dazzlingly evident than in Crossroads.
It’s December 23, 1971, and heavy weather is forecast for Chicago. Russ Hildebrandt, the associate pastor of a liberal suburban church, is on the brink of breaking free of a marriage he finds joyless—unless his wife, Marion, who has her own secret life, beats him to it. Their eldest child, Clem, is coming home from college on fire with moral absolutism, having taken an action that will shatter his father. Clem’s sister, Becky, long the social…
I’ve been reading, studying, and writing about Texas literature for over 25 years.
I’m the longtime literary curator at the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University, which holds the archives of many leading writers from Texas and the Southwest. I have a personal passion for the 1960s and have written/co-written three nonfiction books set in the sixties.
Bud Shrake’s novel of Dallas at the time of the Kennedy Assassination is an excellent example of what I call “eyewitness fiction.” As a prominent journalist at the rabidly anti-JFK Dallas Morning News, Shrake spent time mingling with the far-right millionaires who refashioned Dallas into a “City of Hate.” Yet the politically liberal, dope-smoking Shrake was also a denizen of Dallas’s underworld and was dating the star stripper at Jack Ruby’s nightclub. From these twin worlds, he fashioned this ferocious, comically subversive portrait of Dallas in the months leading up to the assassination.
Shrake’s writing has less in common with his Texas contemporaries than it does with American novelists Ken Kesey, Charles Portis, and Kurt Vonnegut. This novel blasts off so hard it can be a bit hard for some readers to hang on in the beginning. But if you stay with it, and latch on to Shrake’s Dexedrine-fueled…
A TV western star quits his successful series and returns to Dallas to make a documentary film that reveals the truth about his home town. His quest forces him to learn if he is capable of using his six-gun for real as he moves from booze and radical politics in oil men's palaces into the infamous Carousel Club and the underworld of arms and dope smuggling in a city ripe for the murder of a President.
I was a Brooklyn kid who grew up on Long Island. I started hitting the bars and clubs in NYC when I was still a teenager. I found my way to CBGB in 1975, moved to Bleecker St in 1976, and in a right place/right time moment I found myself working the Mudd Club door in early 1979. That moment was a life changer. The Mudd Club book tells the story.
The best book written about 1960’s Pop-Culture madness and mayhem. As founding member of The Fugs and a unique literary voice, Ed Sanders tells this tale brilliantly. The warning signs, the goosebumps, and knowing when it’s time to stop are all there in The Family.
I grew up living in a housing co-op on Vancouver Island, BC. While not technically a commune, it did have some of the hallmarks. There were gangs of partially clothed kids roaming wild. There were a bunch of idealistic adults who had dreams of shared land stewardship and, well, shared everything. The housing project succeeded in many ways (it still exists today) and, it failed in other ways (over the years there were many fractures in the community). I’ve always been fascinated by attempts at communal living. I suppose my obsession with cult life is just an extension of this. It is my life imagined one step further.
Okay, I might be stretching the definition of “cult” with this one, but hear me out.
This book—which is technically non-fiction, but reads an awful lot like a novel—tells the true story of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters’ efforts to dose America with LSD-laced Kool-Aid in the 1960s. But it’s Kesey’s ramblings about creating a new religion and the devotion of the unhinged misfits who orbit around him that make me see the Merry Pranksters as cult-like.
Reading this book, I get the feeling that if Kesey hadn’t been stopped by the FBI, he very well might have changed the world. Or did he manage to change the world anyway? I’ll let you decide.
I looked around and people's faces were distorted...lights were flashing everywhere...the screen at the end of the room had three or four different films on it at once, and the strobe light was flashing faster than it had been...the band was playing but I couldn't hear the music...people were dancing...someone came up to me and I shut my eyes and with a machine he projected images on the back of my eye-lids...I sought out a person I trusted and he laughed and told me that the Kool-Aid had been spiked and that I was beginning my first LSD experience...
I grew up living in a housing co-op on Vancouver Island, BC. While not technically a commune, it did have some of the hallmarks. There were gangs of partially clothed kids roaming wild. There were a bunch of idealistic adults who had dreams of shared land stewardship and, well, shared everything. The housing project succeeded in many ways (it still exists today) and, it failed in other ways (over the years there were many fractures in the community). I’ve always been fascinated by attempts at communal living. I suppose my obsession with cult life is just an extension of this. It is my life imagined one step further.
If you’re as obsessed with Charles Manson as I am, you’ll love this novel, which tells the story of Evie, a bored and misguided 14-year-old girl who ends up inadvertently joining a cult that, while not directly stated to be the Manson cult, certainly alludes to it.
In this cult, the leader is Russell Hadrick, and though I find him less charismatic than Manson, he wields the same power over people. The other cult members and their eventual crime is the same as the real-world cult too. What I’m most impressed with about this book is the way it details everyday cult life, what with its musty piles of communal clothes, the tedium of chores, and the listlessness of too many people with too much time on their hands.
A gripping and dark fictionalised account of life inside the Manson family from one of the most exciting young voices in fiction.
If you're lost, they'll find you...
Evie Boyd is fourteen and desperate to be noticed.
It's the summer of 1969 and restless, empty days stretch ahead of her. Until she sees them. The girls. Hair long and uncombed, jewelry catching the sun. And at their centre, Suzanne, black-haired and beautiful.
If not for Suzanne, she might not have gone. But, intoxicated by her and the life she promises, Evie follows the girls back to the decaying ranch where…
I’ve always been fascinated by the political aesthetics and political ferment of the 1960s. As someone born in the 1960s but not of the 1960’s generation, this has allowed for a certain “critical distance” in the ways I approach this period. I'm especially fascinated by the global circulation of cultural protest forms from the 1960s, what the historian Jeremy Suri called a “language of dissent.” The term Global Sixties is now used to explore this evident simultaneity of “like responses across disparate contexts,” such as finding jipis in Chile. In our book,The Walls of Santiago, we locate various examples of what we term the “afterlives” of Global Sixties protest signage.
Vibrant countercultural scenes grounded in local rock movements transpired across virtually every country in Latin America during the 1960s-70s. There are now several important books that examine various facets of these countercultural movements, and Barr-Melej’s is one of the best in that respect. Focusing on the brief period of Socialist President Salvador Allende (1970-73), his discussion of Chilean jipis and the political battles waged by the Left to contain this so-called foreign import is fascinating. The book falls short in providing an earlier context to the rise of Chile’s countercultural movement and ends abruptly with the rise of dictatorship—a period that transformed rock music into a site of active political protest. But its merits outweigh its shortcomings, especially the lively narration about the Piedra Roja rock festival, Chile’s equivalent of Woodstock.
I’ve known Barr-Melej for many years and eagerly awaited the publication of this book, which was one of only…
Patrick Barr-Melej here illuminates modern Chilean history with an unprecedented chronicle and reassessment of the sixties and seventies. During a period of tremendous political and social strife that saw the election of a Marxist president followed by the terror of a military coup in 1973, a youth-driven, transnationally connected counterculture smashed onto the scene. Contributing to a surging historiography of the era's Latin American counterculture, Barr-Melej draws on media and firsthand interviews in documenting the intertwining of youth and counterculture with discourses rooted in class and party politics. Focusing on ""hippismo"" and an esoteric movement called Poder Joven, Barr-Melej challenges…
We grew up, brothers, in Cleveland’s Ohio antipode – Cincinnati – and so we knew Cleveland mostly in contrast to our home. Despite the many differences, both cities experienced the urban crisis. Richard, a journalist, was drawn to the story of Cleveland’s frequently burning river. How did the Cuyahoga become a poster child for the environmental movement? And David, an environmental historian, was drawn to Carl Stokes, a Black man with the skills to become mayor of a predominantly white city in 1968. How did he propose to solve the many problems running through the urban environment? We both wanted to know what Cleveland’s changing relationship with its river could tell us about environmental politics.
The history of politics can be dry stuff. But Frank Zelko is a natural storyteller – and a gifted historian. His subjects, Greenpeace and the men and women who formed it, provide access to the evolution of North American environmentalism from the 1960s through the 1980s. In vivid detail, Zelko narrates the drama at the heart of the Greenpeace strategy, the “mind bombs” that would activate citizens around the globe to stop whaling – at least mostly. Zelko makes us feel the urgency among these activists, their fear of nuclear testing, and their love of whales. Even among this relatively small group of activists, however, personality conflicts and philosophical differences reveal the difficulty of creating and maintaining a countercultural organization. For many of these folks, organization is not their thing. But action was. And throughout, Zelko’s fine-grained narrative reminds us that individual action is at the heart of all political…
The emergence of Greenpeace in the late 1960s from a loose-knit group of anti-nuclear and anti-whaling activists fundamentally changed the nature of environmentalism-its purpose, philosophy, and tactics-around the world. And yet there has been no comprehensive objective history of Greenpeace's origins-until now.
Make It a Green Peace! draws upon meeting minutes, internal correspondence, manifestos, philosophical writings, and interviews with former members to offer the first full account of the origins of what has become the most recognizable environmental non-governmental organization in the world. Situating Greenpeace within the peace movement and counterculture of the 1960s, Frank Zelko provides a much deeper…
