“The book is amazing. It’s objective, biased, horrifying and profound. At times you feel like you’re reading a nature book on some brutish animal and at other times you feel like you’re peeking into the soul of all mankind. There is never a dull moment and at times you feel scared for the author. At other times you feel jealous that he’s partying with Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey and the Hell’s Angels while everyone is out of their gourd on LSD.

“It was definitely a different time. A time I’d love to visit and this is a book that lets me do just that. Check it out, even if you have to pay full price.”

Subject: The author’s highly intimate memoir includes her business and close relationship with Hunter S. Thompson, the father of Gonzo journalism and author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The literary memoir includes a spiritual initiation at the Jung Zurich Institute. New insights about poet Milton Klonsky, and later husband poet Jan Mensaert included.

Noteworthy: The understandable defining of intuitive transformation, when Harrell was at the Jung Institute, is revealed. Harrell’s rapturous experiences with Thompson and her transformative journey toward wholeness intelligently propel her literary presentation through and beyond literary boundaries.

                                                                             The Mindquest Review of Books

This is Sibiu, Romania, where before moving back to the U.S. from Belgium, I used to spend time each year, working on my books. A wonderful place to write. The photo comes from the new Sibiu website. Here’s another photo of the town, which was a Cultural Capital of Europe, with Luxembourg, in 2007. Look at all the atmosphere in this 900-year-old town of a little over 100,000 people. Of course, the Belgian town I lived in at the time is much older, with relics in the ground over 2000 years, as it was on the trade route from the Middle East.

The extraordinary sequel to “Keep This Quiet”, “Keep THIS Quiet Too! More  Adventures with Hunter S. Thompson, Milton Klonsky, Jan Mensaert,” continues the  memoir chronicles of four adventurous writers (author Margaret Harrell, who  tells her story in first person, and the three named in the subtitle). Spanning  the years 1970 through 1986, and set in locales ranging from the United States  to Morocco, Belgium, and the C.G. Jung Institute within Switzerland, “Keep THIS  Quiet Too!” is a real-life saga of living and learning with eyes and ears open.  At times adventurous, at times sensual, “Keep This Quiet Too!” hinges upon the  complexities of human relationships, especially the challenges posed by the  heart-wrenching feelings of love that may or may not be fully requited. Highly  recommended.

A few review snippets are below. Many topics can come up:

REVIEWS

“Margaret Harrell’s Keep This Quiet offers an illuminating look at Hunter S. Thompson in full throttle trying to make it as a Top Notch prose-stylist. Harrell fills in many important biographical gaps. A welcome addition to what is becoming the HST cottage industry. Read it”—Douglas Brinkley, editor of The Proud Highway and Fear and Loathing in America

“If you want to know what the Sixties were really like, read Keep This Quiet: A Memoir. It’s all there: the openness, the hope, the ideals, the risks, the highs and lows, the travel, the love”—Robert Morgan, author of Gap Creek and Terroir

“Three men, embodiments of three different dimensions of the late 1960’s Zeitgeist—wispy dissolution, language-charged intellect, and Gonzo persona-building—are brought together by Harrell to invoke a world of passion and commitment . . . While most readers will come to this book for the Thompson content, in truth all the portraits here—all four of them—are compelling and often touching” —W. C. Bamberger, Rain Taxi Review of Books

“While the job at Random House did offer her the opportunity to meet a lot of writers and famous people, it is Hunter that became her secret office romance. . . . Every person in the book is bold and well defined”—San Francisco Book Review*****

“Keep This Quiet! is a moving read and much recommended to any literary studies or memoir collection”—Midwest Book Review

“The reader comes to feel an affinity with the trio of writers in their attempts to achieve their iconoclastic visions of success, glimpsing them as individuals beyond their work, seeing how they think. . . . Memoir will likely please Hunter S. Thompson fans and appeal to readers with an interest in the beginnings of the post-modern era or the personal sacrifices involved in bringing serious written work to fruition”—Kirkus Indie Reviews

Hunter at Woody Creek, 1991

Paul Krassner on Obama, Orgies, and the Art of Offensive Cartoons – extract

by Michael Dooley on November 30, 2012

Read the whole post here and especially look at the pictures.  Click here.

There’s something oddly funny about Paul Krassner. And it’s been going on for more than 50 years.

He palled around with Lenny Bruce, the pioneering 1950s “sick” comic, and even edited Bruce’s autobiography, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People. He was instrumental in founding the Yippies!, those radical “Groucho Marxists” who fought the establishment in the late 1960s with theatrical, absurdist guerrilla monkeyshines. And as the editor of The Realist he paved the way for The Simpsons, The Daily Show, and Bill Maher. Kurt Vonnegut and Lewis Black are just two of the legions of fans who cite him as a major influence and inspiration.

The Realist was a proto-underground magazine of “Free-thought Criticism and Satire” begun in 1958. In its heyday, everyone from Norman Mailer and Joseph Heller to Woody Allen and Dick Gregory to Ken Kesey and Tim Leary to Art Spiegelman and S. Clay Wilson appeared on its cheap newsprint pages. Krassner’s most notorious publishing prank was his “Parts That Were Left Out of the Kennedy Book” hoax in 1967, presented as actual excerpts that Jacqueline Kennedy had removed from William Manchester’s The Death of a President prior to publication. Defying conventional norms of taste and decency, its climactic scene involved Jackie discovering LBJ engaged in necrophilia with JFK’s corpse on Air Force One. Many believed it was true, including Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg. You can read the full story in Krassner’s newly updated Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut: Misadventures in the Counterculture.

Uncle Paul wants YOU… to be offended. Exclusive illustration for Imprint by Scott Gandell.

One of the updates in the new edition of this memoir concerns the funny encounter he, Hunter Thompson, and I had in New York in the 1967. The same story I told in Keep This Quiet! His version. In his words.

Paul just e-mailed this story to pass around.

Read more: Paul Krassner on the Art of Offensive Cartoons

Buy book on Amazon

This is the initial reaction of William C. Bamberger to Keep This Quiet Too! More Adventures with Hunter S. Thompson, Milton Klonsky, Jan Mensaert. Bamberger wrote a review for Keep This Quiet! in Rain Taxi Review of Books. He is the author of Riding Some Kind of Unusual Skull Sleigh and other works and has a particular interest, as is apparent, in the writings of Milton Klonsky because of his books and writings on William Blake’s art. Anyway, may others report back in the same vein. It’s a writer’s heaven.  

And may you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving.

It has blurbs by Martin Flynn, Irish HST expert and astute human being, and Chris Van de Velde, who is an all-round amazing human being (living in Ghent). I will let those be a surprise. They are both outstanding.

More later. Just take a look and if you like what you see, this will be right on time for a Christmas present.

More detail later. I am catching my breath. Let me hear from you!! Wishing everyone a wonderful day.

Here’s the Amazon display. Click here.

Barnes & Noble hasn’t got the reviews up there yet. But it was the first to offer it for preorder – at a 33% discount at the time.

The cover image is by Alan Becker, taken in 1991 right at Owl Farm. Hunter set up the background and Alan, who’s a top-notch Aspen professional, did the shoot.