About the Book
On the road with the Blank Generation--a wild trip across the country and into the head of a down-on-his-luck punk musician. It's 1980. Burnt-out, strung-out, and just plain down-and-out, Billy Mud jumps at the chance to drive a car from California to New York, all expenses paid, and write a book about the journey. Accompanied by his ex-girlfriend who's commissioned to contribute photos, Billy sees the book as an opportunity to beat his drug habit, test his talents, and maybe even get the girl.
As Billy skids and ricochets his way across America, Richard Hell explores the funny and frightening landscape inside his head: a labyrinth of hair pin turns, complicated detours, and roller-coaster ups-and-downs. Go Now brings the harrowing world of the underground brilliantly to life.
About the Author :
Richard Hell was born and grew up in Lexington, Kentucky, but dropped out of high school and moved alone to New York at the age of seventeen. He first came to public attention in the mid-1970s as an originator of punk. In 1984, he retired from music and returned to his original ambition of writing books. He is the author of several works of fiction, poetry, essays, notebooks, and autobiography, including The Voidoid, Across the Years, Artifact, Hot and Cold, Godlike, I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp, Massive Pissed Love, and What Just Happened, as well as coauthor of book-length collaborations, including the collection of poems Wanna Go Out? (published under the heteronym Theresa Stern) with the musician Tom Verlaine and the image-texts of Psychopts with the artist Christopher Wool.
Review :
"...real insight and even beauty, not to mention that there's something perversely fascinating about seeing the depths to which he sinks, resulting in a climax that's by turns thrilling and sad." -- "USA Today"
"Go Now is On the Road updated by punk rocker Richard Hell, but Hell's trip across America, while less epic than Jack Kerouac's, is more deadly fun--and a lot sexier. ...By honestly exposing his own wretched psyche, Hell has produced a truer documentary of an American journey for the '90s than Kerouac did for the '50s." -- "Srew"
"Go Now is vile, scabrous, unforgiveable, and deserving of the widest possible audience." --William Gibson, author of Neuromancer
"[A] splenetic journey that delights in changing lanes from one genre to the next without indicating. Hell slews into the oncoming traffic of Hemingway, Henry Miller, and P.J. O'Rourke, but he has sufficient fury to hold his own. Go Now is a lucid, gritty chronicle that flings muck and questions at the reader in equal measure..." -- "Times Literary Supplement"
"Capable of moments of profound personal insight and revelation as well as acts of profane indecency and sexual deviance, Hell's character both seduces and repels. Yet in the end Mud is Hell's greatest gift as a novelist. In the ambiguity of Mud's characterization lies the power of Hell's language. Only a writer as versatile as Hell could describe Mud's bout with heroin withdrawal with sympathy and pathos, then go on to make us despise his semi-conscious hero. Hell, like Mud, plays a great, bold game with the reader, proving himself as a writer with a vision that is not easy to shake off."-- "Bookpage"
"Hell's brilliant junkie novel, Go Now, is prison writing from the lockup of the head, but unlike the majority of addiction testimony, narrator Billy's sentences are hammered out of hard-won insights, snaking around your basic pillars of consciousness--loneliness, self-disgust, oblivion, and sex." -- "The Village Voice"
"I was captive shortly after word one."--Laurie Stone "The Nation"
"Richard Hell's novel is spare, mean and winningly piss elegant." -- "I.D."
"Similar in intensity to Hell's work as a musician and to Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting, with which it shares a junkie's-eye view of life, Go Now is a strange, scary water slide of a read..." --Mim Udovitch "New York Magazine"
"What is surprising -- or even what might be called delightful -- about this novel is its fleshy beauty as a travelogue." --Sarah Vowell "The Twin Cities' City Pages"
