 First edition | |
| Author | Rudolph Wurlitzer |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Psychedelic |
| Publisher | Random House |
Publication date | 1968 |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 167 |
Nog is a psychedelic novel by Rudolph Wurlitzer published in 1968. Monte Hellman's enjoyment of the novel prompted him to hire Wurlitzer to rewrite the screenplay for Two-Lane Blacktop (1971). [1] Nog was reprinted in 2009 by the independent publisher Two Dollar Radio. [2]
The novel, which is deliberately disjointed and at times self-contradictory, is the first-person account of an unnamed unreliable narrator. He occasionally gives his name as Nog, but he also implies that Nog is a different person. At the start of the novel, he is living in a shack on a beach, meditating and rehearsing his memories. He is in possession of a fake octopus housed in the back of a truck, which he may have purchased from a man named Nog. His meditation is disrupted when he sees a woman picking shells. He follows her back to her house, where she and her husband are throwing a party. On the way, the narrator also encounters a silly old man, Colonel Green, who is obsessed with maintaining a seawall outside his beach home. After the party, the action shifts to a city, where the narrator is shopping at a supermarket. He follows another woman, Meridith, to a commune run by a man named Lockett, who is alternately presented as an oracle, a drug dealer, a con-man, and a visionary. The narrator lives in a hallway outside a bathroom for a while, lying on a mattress, then moves to the pantry, where he hands out food to people when they approach. Just when he has settled into this way of life, Lockett and Meridith abduct him, and take him with them on a journey. They raid a hospital for drugs; in the process they encounter a senile old man named The General. Lockett then leads the narrator and Meridith into the woods, where he has stored supplies. They float down a river on a raft, then make camp on a ledge. The narrator stays behind while Lockett and Meridith head down into a small mining town. He builds a wall with a bunch of tin cans, and has sex with a woman who wanders by. He then nearly gets shot by a hunter who calls himself Bench. The two men share drugs. Bench then leads the narrator in a raid on the town, which he claims he owns, and which has been taken over by a group of young people. Lockett, now calling himself Nog, has established himself there as a guru. Bench shoots and kills Lockett and seems to get shot himself. The narrator, now calling himself Lockett, leaves the town with Meridith. They enter a desert, where they meet yet another old man, a hermit named The Captain, who mistakes Nog for Lockett and claims to have known his father. He supplies the couple with tickets to a ship, which they board. There they encounter another old man named The Captain, who also mistakes Nog for Lockett. The novel concludes at sea with the narrator boarding a lifeboat and becoming separated from Meridith. He tells us he "flew to New York."
An article in Atlantic Monthly described the novel as effectively replicating "the slight and continuous dissociation of reality...normally achieved by using soft drugs to tinker with the nervous system." Thomas Pynchon wrote of the book: "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." [3]
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr. is an American novelist noted for his dense and complex novels. His fiction and non-fiction writings encompass a vast array of subject matter, genres and themes, including history, music, science, and mathematics. For Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon won the 1973 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.
The Crying of Lot 49 is a 1966 novella by the American author Thomas Pynchon. The shortest of Pynchon's novels, the plot follows Oedipa Maas, a young Californian woman who begins to embrace a conspiracy theory as she possibly unearths a centuries-old feud between two mail distribution companies. One of these companies, Thurn and Taxis, actually existed, operating from 1806 to 1867, and was the first private firm to distribute postal mail. Like most of Pynchon's writing, The Crying of Lot 49 is often described as postmodernist literature. Time included the novel in its "TIME 100 Best English-Language Novels from 1923 to 2005".
V. is the debut novel of Thomas Pynchon, published in 1963. It describes the exploits of a discharged U.S. Navy sailor named Benny Profane, his reconnection in New York with a group of pseudo-bohemian artists and hangers-on known as the Whole Sick Crew, and the quest of an aging traveler named Herbert Stencil to identify and locate the mysterious entity he knows only as "V." It was nominated for a National Book Award.
Ishmael is a character in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), which opens with the line, "Call me Ishmael." He is the first person narrator in much of the book. Because Ishmael plays a minor role in the plot, early critics of Moby-Dick assumed that Captain Ahab was the protagonist. Many either confused Ishmael with Melville or overlooked the role he played. Later critics distinguished Ishmael from Melville, and some saw his mystic and speculative consciousness as the novel's central force rather than Captain Ahab's monomaniacal force of will.
Gravity's Rainbow is a 1973 novel by American writer Thomas Pynchon. The narrative is set primarily in Europe at the end of World War II and centers on the design, production and dispatch of V-2 rockets by the German military. In particular, it features the quest undertaken by several characters to uncover the secret of a mysterious device, the Schwarzgerät, which is slated to be installed in a rocket with the serial number "00000".
Martín Fierro, also known as El Gaucho Martín Fierro, is a 2,316-line epic poem by the Argentine writer José Hernández. The poem was originally published in two parts, El Gaucho Martín Fierro (1872) and La Vuelta de Martín Fierro (1879). The poem supplied a historical link to the gauchos' contribution to the national development of Argentina, for the gaucho had played a major role in Argentina's independence from Spain.
Rudolph "Rudy" Wurlitzer is an American novelist and screenwriter.
Hogg is a novel by American author Samuel R. Delany, written in 1969 and completed in 1995. The novel deals graphically with themes of murder, child molestation, incest, coprophilia, coprophagia, urolagnia, anal-oral contact, necrophilia and rape. It was conceptualized and written in 1969, with a further draft completed in 1973, and it was finally published with some further, though relatively minor, rewrites in 1995 by Black Ice Books. Two later editions have featured some corrections, the last of which, published by Fiction Collective Two in 2004, carries a note from Delany stating that it is definitive.
Two-Lane Blacktop is a 1971 American road movie directed by Monte Hellman, written by Rudy Wurlitzer and starring songwriter James Taylor, the Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson, Warren Oates, and Laurie Bird.
Zorba the Greek is a novel written by the Cretan author Nikos Kazantzakis, first published in 1946. It is the tale of a young Greek intellectual who ventures to escape his bookish life with the aid of the boisterous and mysterious Alexis Zorba. The novel was adapted into the successful 1964 film of the same name directed by Michael Cacoyannis, as well as a stage musical and a BBC radio play.
The Age of the Pussyfoot is a science fiction novel by American writer Frederik Pohl, first published as a serial in Galaxy Science Fiction in three parts, starting in October 1965. It was later published as a standalone novel in 1969.
Against the Day is an epic historical novel by Thomas Pynchon, published in 2006. The narrative takes place between the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and the time immediately following World War I and features more than a hundred characters spread across the United States, Europe, Mexico, Central Asia, Africa and "one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all," according to the book jacket blurb written by Pynchon. Like its predecessors, Against the Day is an example of historiographic metafiction or metahistorical romance. At 1,085 pages, it is the longest of Pynchon's novels to date.
Layer Cake is the debut novel of British author J. J. Connolly, first published in 2000 by Duckworth Press. It was made into a motion picture in 2004, directed by Matthew Vaughn and written for the screen by Connolly himself.
Djinn is a novel by French writer Alain Robbe-Grillet. It was written as a French textbook with California State University, Dominguez Hills professor Yvone Lenard using a process of grammatical progression. Each chapter covers a specific element of French grammar which becomes increasingly difficult over the course of the novel. The first five chapters are written in the present tense from the first person point of view. The sixth chapter is written partially in the third person past and partially in the first person present. The eighth chapter is written in the first person point of view, but the narrator has changed from the masculine Simon Lecoeur to an unknown female narrator.
"Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones" is a science fiction short story by American writer Samuel R. Delany, published in the December 1968 issue of New Worlds. It won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story 1970, and the Nebula Award for Best Novelette in 1969.
Inherent Vice is a novel by American author Thomas Pynchon, originally published in August 2009. A darkly comic detective novel set in 1970s California, the plot follows sleuth Larry "Doc" Sportello whose ex-girlfriend asks him to investigate a scheme involving a prominent land developer. Themes of drug culture and counterculture are prominently featured. It is considered a postmodern novel that warps the stylistic conventions of detective fiction. Critical reception was largely positive, with reviewers describing Inherent Vice as one of Pynchon's more accessible works. The novel was adapted into a 2014 film of the same name.
Two Dollar Radio is an independent family-run publisher based in Columbus, Ohio. The company was founded in 2005 by husband-and-wife team Eric Obenauf and Eliza Jane Wood-Obenauf, with Brian Obenauf. The press specializes in literary fiction. In 2013 they launched their micro-budget film division, Two Dollar Radio "Moving Pictures." In 2017 they co-founded the annual Columbus, Ohio, arts festival The Flyover Fest. Also in 2017 (September) the press opened a brick-and-mortar named Two Dollar Radio Headquarters on the south side of Columbus, Ohio, which is a bookstore, full bar, performance space, and vegan coffeehouse and cafe, carrying Two Dollar Radio titles as well as a selection of almost exclusively independently published books.
Jesus' Son is a collection of short fiction by Denis Johnson published in 1992 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. A short story cycle comprising 11 pieces, Jesus' Son is Johnson's most critically acclaimed and popular literary effort, and the work with which Johnson is most identified. In 1999, it was adapted into a film of the same name by Elizabeth Cuthrell, David Urrutia, and Oren Moverman, directed by Alison Maclean.
The Bone Clocks is a novel by British writer David Mitchell. It was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize 2014, and called one of the best novels of 2014 by Stephen King. The novel won the 2015 World Fantasy Award.
The Invention of Curried Sausage is a novella by German author Uwe Timm detailing the fictionalized invention of currywurst, a popular dish of sausage in curry ketchup in Germany, as well as describing life in Hamburg in the last days of the Second World War. The story follows an unnamed journalist seeking to track down the recipe of the currywurst he had when he was a child. The journalist believes that this particular currywurst recipe was the original recipe and that its creator, Lena Brücker, was the inventor of currywurst. His search leads him to the nursing home where Lena Brücker now lived. Lena's agreement to tell the journalist the story of how she came to invent currywurst serves as the major plot throughout the novel.