WannaBeat

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

David Polonoff came to San Francisco in the ’70s seeking trace elements of the Beatniks. He found them mingled among the early incursion of punk, the beginnings of tech, the final vestiges of the hippies and the art-mad crowd that filled North Beach during those halcyon days of the Cockettes, Tubes, Mabuhay Gardens and a thousand crazed visionaries. He vividly captures a decadent, delicious and deranged time and place – some of the same territory visited by Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad.

—Joel Selvin, author and journalist (ex-San Francisco Chronicle)

I moved to SF in 1976, so David Polonoff's take on post-Beat/Hippie San Francisco in that time is familiar. While fictional, WannaBeat is excellent social history, a portrait of a city that was still a sanctuary for anti-materialism. With cameos and visits to the Mabuhay Gardens, the Magic Theater, the Hooker's Ball, the Keystone Korner, and Henry's Hunan ... it's a rich memoir of a very special place, where dreams flowered, even if they didn't always come true.

—Dennis McNally, A Long Strange Trip

San Francisco during the ‘70s manifested a beguiling yet colorful cultural confluence of fifties beats, sixties hippiedom, and an emerging punk scene – all with the imminent digital revolution a-bubblin' up ominously in the background. David Polonoff distills his lived experiences there into a subtle and supremely readable transmogrification of Kerouac's own picaresques. Exploring subcultures within subcultures, Polonoff spins ultimately edifying tales of a bright young smartass on the make in this wickedly witty and delightfully self-mocking debut novel.

—Richard Gehr, I Only Read It for the Cartoons: The New Yorker's Most Brilliantly Twisted Artists

In WannaBeat, Polonoff describes the late ’70s/early ’80s San Francisco beat-to-punk world I lived in with a lighthearted profundity that many have tried but few have come closer to capturing as well.

—Howie Klein, co-founder of 415 Records, former president of Reprise Records

Pass-the-potatoes fiction, with no scrimp in the starch. Genuwine, authentic—all that shit. GIMME GIMME SPUDS, JACK!

—Richard Meltzer, author of A Whore Just Like the Rest