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"1968: the Lost Notebooks of Stephen Sellars"
The loose confederation of old hippies, non-conformists and anarchists behind Open List Publishing have decided climbing on the carousel of pre-digested publicity is a step in the wrong direction. Or else they’ve decided to bury their heads in the sand, and who can blame them? It’s a different world & nobody gives a fuck any more about their high hopes and pipe dreams.
But the Lost Notebooks of Stephen Sellars isn't nostalgia or navel-gazing. If we didn't tell you it was set in 1968, would you have figured it out? What else do you need to know ?
● It’s set in Chicago, sort of. But probably you don’t need to know that.
● There’s more period detail in the first paragraph of Pynchon’s Inherent Vice than in the whole of this book. Also: no sex, no rock’n’roll. (You can decide for yourself whether altered states of consciousness have anything to do with Sellars’ prose style).
●It’s an old-fashioned modernist crime novel (you know, beginning middle and end, but not necessarily in that order). Or it’s a bicameral novel, obviously post-modern. It’s not an unfinished novel.
● It’s for people who enjoy reading. (But not for everyone—like that show Harry Haller takes in—so you’re not being offered a money-back guarantee.)
●Writers mentioned by name: Edgar Allan Poe, Nathanael Hawthorne, Jack London, William Styron. Writers not mentioned by name: Stephen Crane, Nelson Algren, Norman Mailer. (Several others are also not mentioned by name.)
● It’s not the cleverest book in the pile, but don’t you just get tired of all those literary athletes out there on the track before the race, preening and oiling their muscles ? You don’t ? Well, maybe you’re sharp enough to realize the author has adopted and put in to practice some of the precepts of Herbert Quain.
● Orson Welles is in it. (He’s driving a bus.)
● Also—let’s be serious for a moment—the book is not funny. It’s serious. One or two laffs, tops.
● It’s available from major online booksellers.