Fan man / William Kotzwinklw.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Selected for a Pharos Editions' reissue by T.C. Boyle and featuring a foreword by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Pharos Editions is proud to announce the long awaited revival of William Kotzwinkle's cult comic classic, The Fan Man . And just in time it is, too, man. If you haven't read it you are in for a rare and wondrous treat. If you have, isn't it about time you returned that copy you borrowed from your best pal Pete back in '74 and replace it with this stunning new edition, man?

I am all alone in my pad, man, my piled-up-to-the-ceiling-with-junk pad. Piled with sheet music, with piles of garbage bags bursting with rubbish and encrusted frying pans piled on the floor, embedded with unnameable flecks of putrefied wretchedness in grease. My pad, man, my own little Lower East Side Horse Badorties pad . . . . . . .And so it begins Badorties' narration of his down-at-the-heels drug-fueled befuddlement in New York City circa 1970.

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

Introduction by T.C. Boyle I am holding in my hand an artifact of a time long gone, a time when we all had hair, and plenty of it, when we were members of an ever-expanding tribe and weren't afraid to wear dashikis, top hats and rayon shirts with huge bleeding eyeballs dripping down into the waistband of our ventilated three-foot wide striped bell-bottom trousers. We had tribal rituals to sustain us, outdoor concerts, days that blended mystically one into the other, love that might have been free in the moment but wound up being very, very expensive in the long run. We had drugs and music and the astonishing literary improvisations of Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, Jorge Luis Borges, Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Brautigan and William Kotzwinkle, the author of this very artifact, my original 1974 copy of the Avon Equinox paperback of The Fan Man, cover price $2.45. Why should this matter? Because The Fan Man is that rare literary marvel, a book that makes you laugh till you have to put it down and catch your breath, as funny in its own unique hyperbolic onrushing way as A Confederacy of Dunces and Lucky Jim, both of which, like this one, feature hapless, hopelessly degenerate protagonists--heroes!--who blunder their way across a landscape of stultified convention. The original model here, of course, is Don Quixote, though Kotzwinkle's protagonist, Horse Badorties, needs no Sancho Panza to counterbalance his delusions--Kotzwinkle allows the reader to fulfill that role. We are with our hero fully, though he's not so much seeing giants in windmills but simultaneously embracing and scamming the junk-strewn society he finds himself immersed in, whether he's rejecting the panoply of poisonous foods available to him in the eateries of the Lower East Side in favor of the healthful ground-up anus and eyeball largesse of the street vendor's hot dog or buying a brake-challenged school bus with one of his rubber checks and filling it with some truly serious junk, like an air-raid siren and mine sweeper. Even better, he acquires an enormous hot-dog-emblazoned umbrella from a complicit street vendor and becomes the Knight of the Hot Dog, replete with his banner and colors. And where's the windmill? No windmill, but a fan, the enormous basement fan in the Museum of Natural History he yearns to acquire for his Love Concert. Horse Badorties is, fortunately, not what we would today call politically correct. A "blonde chick" is merrily raped with no more consequence or inner turmoil than having to endure a VD shot, and Puerto Ricans--their culture, their music, the slippery slope of their open-vowel accents--come in for satirical drubbing throughout. But then The Fan Man was composed in a time before the Nunnery of the Verboten and the Monastery of the P.C. came along to shame us and dictate what we can legitimately think and say, and where's the holy bleeding satire in that? Satire is designed to provoke and offend and The Fan Man succeeds swimmingly here, but it also succeeds in making risible fun of its protagonist while at the same time putting us squarely on his side, Sancho Panzas all. If Horse Badorties is a caricature of the quintessential hippie stoner dropout, he also has a purpose and a redemptive vision--the Love Chorus Concert, humming with fans and aglow with the conjoined voices of all his otherworldly fifteen-year-old chicks. That he doesn't triumph (unlike Lucky Jim) is, of course, in character--in his reminiscent haze in Van Cortlandt Park he mistakes the day--and makes the ending all the more ironic and poignant too, the holy fool wholly fooled. But then, the concert did go on and the TV crew showed up, the saxophone player stood in admirably at the podium, and the music, which was the whole point, soared into the night. How does all this work, ultimately? What makes this a comic classic? Voice. The hilarious internal monologue that drives the protagonist through his days, a voice not unlike the one that rings deep and individually through all our brains, the private voice here made public: "Horse Badorties waking up again, man. Man, what planet am I on? I seem to be contained in some weird primeval hideous grease. Wait a second, man, that is my Horse Badorties pillow-case. I am alive and well in my own Horse Badorties abominable life." How can you resist that? Get awake. Be awake. And prepare yourself for a major laughing jag, man. Excerpted from The Fan Man by William Kotzwinkle All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

William Kotzwinkle was born in 1938 in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He attended Rider College and Pennsylvania State University.He worked as an editor and writer in the 1960s. William Kotzwinkle is an accomplished author who is best known for his book of the film E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, but who has produced a range of work for both adults and children that often transgresses genre boundaries and the distinction between serious and popular fiction. Beginning as a children's writer with The Fireman, he then published novels for adults such as Hermes 3000, The Fan Man, and Queen of Swords, which began to establish him as an original and distinctive novelist. But it was Doctor Rat that made his reputation as a powerful fantasy writer with a sharp satirical edge. The novel focuses upon laboratory rats whose spokesman, the Doctor Rat of the title, eventually escapes from the vast laboratory where experiments on his fellow-creatures are taking place, and whose adventures are interwoven with shorter tales told by animals of different kinds who finally try to form a whole that will make humans more peaceful and benign. But they are all killed. William Kotzwinkle is a novelist and poet, who is known for his broad range of style and subject. He is a two-time recipient of the National Magazine Award for Fiction, a National Book Critics Circle Award nominee. He lives with his wife, author Elizabeth Gundy, in Maine. He has won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel for Doctor Rat in 1977. He published The Million Dollar Bear in 1994.

(Bowker Author Biography)