NEW:
*****/*****
"[Nog's] combo of Samuel Beckett syntax and hippie-era freakiness mapped out
new literary territory for generations to come. Nog also asserts the power of language.
Wurlitzer's stun-gun prose exerts a mysterious control, even when it's in the midst of a psychotic
break, or cataloguing objects on the floor."
-Michael Miller, Time Out New York
"There is so much momentum toward the future in this cross-country journey that a reader could easily feel
as though the author had pulled out the stopper to let the past and the present go rushing down the drain.
In other words, the scary parts are when it starts to make sense. There is tripping, there are tattoos,
there is sex with multiple partners (arms, legs, all very loving). Go West! Go East! Cowboys,
Buddhists and cowboy Buddhists abound. A bit of Jack Kerouac, a bit of James Joyce in the moments of
revelation when the clouds part . . . This is not the '60s of sweet kids and folk music; nor is it
sinister and doomed to an irrelevant old age. The trippiness contains an Ariadne's thread to
something older and more meaningful: an effort to break free, a hero's tale."
-Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times Book Review
"The revival of Rudy Wurlitzer's first novel, Nog, with a fresh introduction by Erik Davis,
introduces a lucky new generation of readers to an essential piece of '60s literature that remains
as crunchy and toothsome yet unsettling a nonpareil as it registered upon its debut. Nog's capricious
West Coast encounters with a host of American purebreds, from the hippies Lockett and Meridith to the
right-wing gun nut Bench, all couched in droll vernacular, provides a constant impetus to turn page
after page in this surreal California phantasmagoria."
-Paul DiFilippo, Barnes & Noble Review
Summer Book Pick: "Nog - part quest novel, part Western, part artifact of late-'60s acid
culture - pushes the boundaries of selfhood in a highly readable and often hilarious way."
-Jed Lipinski, Village Voice
"Wurlitzer is working on some strange, big stuff that only novelists in the '60s -
and Denis Johnson - were allowed to do. One can't ever be sure of anything in Nog,
except that the delirium has aged well."
-Jonathan Messinger, Time Out Chicago
"Rudolph Wurlitzer's Nog is no airport novel. Nog is a subtle and nomadic book, a great
counterforce to the loud, sentimental, novels of bullshit that take up so much space in today's literary
landscape."
-Matt McGregor, The Rumpus
"A successful and haunting piece of experimental fiction, and a reader who has enjoyed it will press it
upon others."
-Jeremy Hatch, The Quarterly Conversation
"Wurlitzer is a true American master of literary form. If all art is at once surface and symbol,
as Oscar Wilde suggests in the preface to Picture of Dorian Gray, then Wurlitzer's 1969
debut novel is the ultimate expression of that statement, a writhing copperhead snake that is
difficult to hold onto but spellbinding to observe in its raw, natural beauty."
-Rodger Jacobs, PopMatters.com
"Reading Nog is akin to reading other counterculture books of the era, particularly
the works of Richard Brautigan. That Nog continues to endure is a sign that the novel
transcends its existence as a cultural artifact to emerge as a work of continuing resonance."
-Gerry Donaghy, Powells.com
* Interview with Rudolph Wurlitzer by Rob Hart at Chuck Palaniuk's
The Cult.
PREVIOUS:
“Nog is to literature what Dylan is to lyrics.” —Jack Newfield, Village Voice
“A strange, singular book... somewhere between Psychedelic Superman and Samuel Beckett...
full of classic, post-existential nausea. Despite (because of) the silence, the immobility,
the slippery but thoroughly suffused sensuality, the book is an accomplishment.”
—Newsweek
“Merge[s] a Beckett-like sense of ennui with the cool irony of the counterculture
to explore the territory between what we perceive and what we are. A new kind of
American travelogue.” —David Ulin, Los Angeles Time Book Review
“A countercultural jewel.” —Erik Davis, BookForum
“This strikes me as the most original, exciting and talented new novel since Thomas
Pynchon’s V.” —Richard Poirier, Partisan Review
“Rudolph Wurlitzer inhabits a nightmare world... he renders his readers as breathless
as himself... an undeniable talent for those not subject to vertigo.”
—Alan Pryce-Jones, New York Post
“It attempts, quite successfully, to reproduce in the reader’s mind the simplification,
the slight and continual dissociation from ordinary jagged reality . . . normally
achieved by using soft drugs to tinker with the nervous system.”
—Atlantic Monthly
"Wow, this is some book, I mean, it’s more than a beautiful and heavy trip, it’s also
very important in an evolutionary way, showing us directions we could be moving in
– hopefully another sign that the Novel of Bullshit is dead and some kind of re-enlightenment
is beginning to arrive, to take hold. Rudolph Wurlitzer is really, really good,
and I hope he manages to come down again soon, long enough anyhow to guide us on
another one like Nog." —Thomas Pynchon
Rudolph Wurlitzer has published five novels - Nog,