Down and In: Life in the Underground was originally published in 1987 and traces the development of New York's underground scene by way of Lower Manhattan's hotspots from the late 1940s to the mid-1980s. A dialogic and semi-autobiographical report,
Down and In taps the immediate wealth of experience of many subterraneans down and in as voiced in face-to-face interviews with the narrator.
"Making this book was more than bar-hopping down memory lane. It is a collaborative cross-cultural construction with a star-studded road gang helping Ron find the way to his own history. And more."
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New York Times Book Review This new edition of
Down and In is the definitive version of the text and represents volume 10 of our Ronald Sukenick Edition. Carefully proofread and with a new design, it was produced in close cooperation with Julia Frey (now Julia Nolet), the widow and heir of Ronald Sukenick.
RONALD SUKENICK (1932-2004) was one of the most important innovators, editors, and critics of US-American literature. His eight novels, three collections of short stories, and four books of nonfiction/theory, published between 1968 and 2005, have variously been described as avantgarde, energetically performative, dissident, revisionistic, and a threat to all hierarchies. Educated at Cornell University, New York, and Brandeis University, Massachusetts, Sukenick taught as Professor of English at the University of Colorado, Boulder, from 1975 to 1999, where he was also director of the creative writing program. Sukenick co-founded the publishing house the Fiction Collective (now FC2) and edited the journals
American Book Review and
Black Ice Magazine.