New arrival from Moloko+:
Harold Norse – Autostop! (Hitching through Italy on $2 a Day)
On 6th July 1954, on the day of his 38th birthday, the American poet Harold Norse set off on an adventure across Italy. Best known for his contributions as a Beat poet, and later as a Gay Liberation poet, Norse travelled around Europe between 1953 and 1968, where he honed his craft as a poet and picaro. Published for the first time, Autostop! Hitching Through Italy on $2 a Day is a reminder of Norse’s skill as prose writer and raconteur, here weaving in Italian history and culture – “sketching it,” he tells us “not snapping it in black and white and Kodachrome.”
In Autostop!, the sounds, smells and eroticism of the country come alive, especially in the accounts of the people he meets in Naples, Capri, Calabria, and Sicily. “I would look at no book, consult no encyclopedia,” Norse explains, “without first consulting the peasant, the laborer, the tradesman, the professional, the aristocrat.” This is the guidebook of a poet; a “love affair,” as Norse puts it in which the country comes alive.
(from the blurb of this edition)