Local author Jonah Raskin will read from his book, Beat Blues: San Francisco, 1958, on Sunday, May 15th at 2pm. The birth of counterculture in 1955 San Francisco reverberates to this day. Part road-novel and part historical fiction, Beat Blues: San Francisco 1955 dives into the zeit-geist, taking readers behind the scenes at Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights Bookstore and publishing company and into subterranean San Francisco, where bohemians, artists, and hipsters rubbed shoulders with jazz greats. Jonah ties in the well-known representatives of the Beat Generation to the story of Norman, a newcomer to the scene who must confront his own racial privileges as the counterculture intersects with the Civil Rights Movement.

Jonah Raskin is a long-time teacher, scholar, and aficionado of the Beat writers. He is the author of American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and the Making of the Beat Generation as well as three noir novels and six poetry chapbooks. He taught Beat literature at the State University of New York at Stony Book and at Sonoma State University. Currently, he writes for CounterPunch, the New York Journal of Books, Tablet, The Rag Blog and the North Bay Bohemian.  He can be reached at jonah.raskin@sonoma.edu