SBN 0-671-76781-X (US hbk)

"Bohemia has its charismatic leaders, its gurus, gods, and devils -- and Herbert Gold chronicles them compellingly in this unique moveable feast.

"Begin to read Bohemia and you will wander to the Left Bank of Paris in the fifties, where you will linger with William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, Jean Genet and Henry Miller. You will sip a dark brew, arguing politics and passion, in a Jerusalem coffeehouse just after the Six-Day War. You will join drug-amplified street theater 'happenings' in the San Francisco of Haight-Ashbury, the sixties, and the ongoing Loizaida of Manhattan. From intimate fetes in Greenwich Village to the Art Deco book shops of Miami, the off-center canals of Venice, California, and the college towns of America, and in Moscow, Port-au-Prince, Palma, and La Jolla -- wherever you happen to stop and browse -- Herbert Gold will be there with stories of art and angst, wit and compassion.

"Within these pages, you will meet the famous Upper Bohemians: Woody Allen in one of his first stand-up acts at the new Hungry I...William Saroyan on a cross-generational 'double-date'...Anaïs Nin contemplating erotic adventure in New York...Henry Miller merrily contemplating himself. Here, too, are the 'would-bees', like the collagist of 'The Oldest Living Coke Bottle Top', and the happy Doctor of Sunamatism with his recipe for virility (proven by testing on the emperor Charlemagne), and the woman whose personals ad '...seeks man with one earring, ponytail or moral equivalent.

"So head for the nearest poetry reading. Offer yourself a seat in a cappuccino-scented café and enjoy a feast of the past, a set of keen observations and meditations on our fast-forward present. You are welcomed to Bohemia, where art, angst, and strong coffee meet." [jacket blurb, US hbk, 1993]

"...Bohemia is at least a busy café of watchers and waiters, doers and don'ters, thinkers and the heedless, men and women possessed of the need to seize the day or plan the future or regret the past, all stubbornly devoted to demonstrating that life really is what good sense tells us it is not." --Herbert Gold (from the book).

"Call it the Beat Generation. Call it hippiedom. Call it an alternative life-style to Yuppieville. Whatever its label, Bohemia is still here, never lost, a secret someplace of free spirits, the nation with no capital, no main office, no citizenship board." [jacket blurb, US hbk, 1993]

"Postwar Paris, the San Francisco of Beats and Hippies, these are but a few of the island stops on Herbert Gold's journey across the last half of our century on a quest fired by life's high and low curiosities, tempered with ever deepening insights as a young man grows wise, and a wise man grows young." --Thomas Sanchez (author of Mile Zero and Rabbit Boss ).

"For Herbert Gold curiosity has been a lifelong unrestrained appetite. He has gone to and fro in the hep, beat, hip world -- looking, listening, tasting, translating a bewildering mess of would-be outsiders' wacky dreams and pretenses into comely, shrewd, wonderfully funny stories. He has everybody's number, especially his own; this is cultural autobiography at its personal best." --Geoffrey Wolff (author of The Duke of Deception ).

"" --Henry W.Targowski (in Mark/Space , 1997).