Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me

In an unerring, corrosively comic depiction of a campus in revolt, Richard Farina evokes the 1960s as surely as F. Scott Fitzgerald captured the 1920s. A landlocked, college-age hipster called Gnossos Pappadopoulis weaves his way through the psychedelic landscape, encountering - among other things - mescaline, women, demonology, hunting, truth, smuggling, falsehood, gluttony, prayer, science, fetishes, and occasional art. This is a classic novel of an explosive, expansive decade, a book that resonates as social history, sparkles with novellistic inventiveness and embodies the attitudes of an entire generation. Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me, as Thomas Pynchon writes in the introduction, "comes on like the Hallelujah Chorus done by 200 kazoo players with perfect pitch."