MCD

"Tramps Like Us charts an incredible moment in the 20th century, the 70s and 80s, when the young roamed around America like wild dogs, randomly having sex and taking drugs, concerned about clothes and music and maybe enjoying the landscape. From ''here'' it seems fantastic. So much of that land is gone, yet this writer speaks like a sweet and unworldly citizen of a place you''d like to know. Sometimes it''s just plain youth. As told by Joe." ?Eileen Myles, author of a "Working Life"A treasured cult classic following a young gay man crisscrossing 1970s and ?80s America in search of salvation. Now reissued with an introduction from Eileen Myles and an afterword from the author. Abused by his father and stifled by closeted life as a teenager in Kansas City, Joe, the wide-eyed narrator of Tramps Like Us, graduates from high school in 1974 and hits the road hitchhiking. But it isn?t until he reunites with Ali, his hometown?s other queer outcast, that Joe finds a partner in crime. When the two of them finally wash up in New Orleans, they discover a hedonistic paradise of sex, drugs, and music, a world that only expands when they move to San Francisco in 1979.Told with openhearted frankness, Joe Westmoreland?s Tramps Like Us is an exuberantly soulful adventure of self-discovery and belonging, set across a consequential American decade. In New Orleans and San Francisco, and on the roads in between, Joe and Ali find communities of misfits to call their own. The days and nights blur, a blend of LSD and heroin, new wave and disco, orgies and friends, and the thrilling spontaneity of youth?all of which is threatened the moment Joe, Ali, and seemingly everyone around them are diagnosed with HIV. But miraculously, the stories survive. As Eileen Myles writes, ?I love this book most of all because it is so mortal.?Back in print after two decades and with an introduction by Myles and an afterword by the author, Tramps Like Us is an ode to a nearly lost generation, an autofictional chronicle of America between gay liberation and the AIDS crisis, and an evergreen testament to the force of friendship.

For John Freeman--literary critic, essayist, editor, poet, "one of the preeminent book people of our time" (Dave Eggers)--it is the rare moment when words are not enough. But in the wake of the election of 2016, words felt useless, even indulgent. Action was the only reasonable response. He took to the streets in protest, and the sense of community and collective conviction felt right. But the assaults continued--on citizens' rights and long-held compacts, on the core principles of our culture and civilization, and on our language itself. Words seemed to be losing the meanings they once had and Freeman was compelled to return to their defense. The result is his Dictionary of the Undoing. From A to Z, "Agitate" to "Zygote," Freeman assembled the words that felt most essential, most potent, and began to build a case for their renewed power and authority, each word building on the last. The message that emerged was not to retreat behind books, but to emphatically engage in the public sphere, to redefine what it means to be a literary citizen. With an afterword by Valeria Luiselli, Dictionary of the Undoing is a necessary, resounding cri de coeur in defense of language, meaning, and our ability to imagine, describe, and build a better world.