Return to Mark/Space
ISBN 0-688-12411-9 (US trade pbk),,, 0-380-72364-6 (US pbk)
novel, slipstream, science fiction, postmodern, music, 1960s
Winner of the World Fantasy Award for best novel.
"There's no time like the present...to fix the past.
"Ray Shackleford has a passion his wife doesn't understand, a purpose his father will never live to acknowledge, and a future that is falling pitifully short of what was promised in the 1960s. But Ray also has a talent he never imagined -- the ability to call forth music that never was, pop masterpieces rumored but never realized by the legends of a bygone era. And now he is going back to the heyday of Morrison, Hendrix and the Beatles to relive a rock-and-roll history that wasn't but should have been. For Ray Shackleford has discovered the awesome power to rescue and inspire, to experience firsthand the hypnotic, destructive narcotic of fame...and to change his own life, note by note." [jacket blurb, US pbk, August 1995]
"A moody, melancholy novel of music, madness and time-travel". --Richard Kadrey (in Covert Culture Sourcebook , 1993).
"A nostalgic tumble down memory's dead-end streets... a pop music fairy tale linking the Beatles to Bruno Bettelheim." -- (in Village Voice Literary Supplement ).
"Lewis Shiner is the most important and promising young writer on the scene today... Glimpses captures the sixties perfectly -- I was there, and it was the way Shiner writes it." --Timothy Leary.
"Glimpses opens the way into several haunted rooms at the very heart of the myth of the Sixties." --William Gibson.
"Glimpses is something entirely new under the sun: simultaneously a superb contemporary novel, and a groundbreaking work of creative rock criticism... I wish I'd written it myself." --Charles Shaar Murray (author of Crosstown Traffic: Jimi Hendrix and Post-War Pop... also see his intro to In Dreams edited by Paul J.McAuley and Kim Newman).
"Glimpses is dead-on... It's a mean, sweet, wry, and disturbing book, in equal portions." --Frederick Barthelme (author of The Brothers ).
"Lewis Shiner has found a way to write about the power of the music and the love it inspired without cloying the mysteries of time, death, sex and blood relation." --Geoff Ryman (author of Was ).
"Lewis Shiner does it again. This book is full of wonderful insights... the music, the 60s, the counterculture, and a deeply personal breakup/breakdown. Warm and sympathetic. Glimpses captures the spirit of a generation which sought to create an ideal world.
"There's a hell of a lot more I'd like to say about this book. The way it got under my skin to reach deep inside. The way the thoughts (his and mine) ran together like two threads weaving in-and-out. The memories like total immersion... I was there, living with, knowing, being. Tripping on purple haze, living in the Grateful Dead's old apartment on Clayton Street where my ear was pierced the first time, and later just down a Marin County road from Peter Albin of Big Brother where our kids played together, and much later hearing from a close friend who was just helping Monika Dannemann with her book on Hendrix, and even later still hearing the news on the radio that she was dead. The tightly-woven intersections of lives and experiences: the Avalon, the Roundhouse... Monterey Pop and Hyde Park... the Arts Lab and the Melkweg... people from past and future meeting in a timeless now. Names piling up in a fractal whirlpool of hyperreality. My marriage breaking up after seventeen years, and life still struggling to make things right, to make good. Shiner has caught all this and put it on paper. I want to go out and buy dozens of copies to give to my friends... saying: here, you'll like this, you're in it somewhere. There's still hope." --Henry W.Targowski (in Mark/Space , May 1996).
Highly recommended.
Glimpses review by John Kessel
(review)
"Let The Good Times Roll"
(a review of Glimpses )
Review of Glimpses by Andreas Hirn
(german language version... e-mail: hirn@infnisserv.informatik.uni-halle.de)
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