Description
- Kind: Perfectbound
- Pages: 120
- Language: English
- Date Published: May 2025
- ISBN 978-1-962847-26-1
Plot Summary
Young Jack Acid, aspiring artist and writer, lands in a halfway house transported from Cincinnati to San Francisco mid 1970s, in the midst of left coast marijuana uprising, and social unrest. Rejected by radical mental health intervention, traditional means are suggested causing Jack to seek Zen, the Merry Pranksters, hitchhiking, storytelling, and rockstardom.
Years later he absorbs the intervention of Unusually Tretheway, a lesbian Sensei, whose hallucination chamber yields a story including radio, Cuba, Lansky in Cuba, time travel, famous people in and out of place and time, photography, fine art, Harvard, mystical romance, method acting and neurolinguistic programming.
Jack, somehow restored from Cuban highs, through institutions in Ohio, faces his schizophrenia, transcends his alcoholism, and discovers poetry in the shoes of being.
Praise
Lansky’s singular, marvelously absurd, graphic, hybrid novella, Shoes has cutting-edge detailed, prose modeled on recanted reality. It moves like the doorway god Janus, who, upon the threshold, looks both outwards, and to the interior. Two faces, toggle facets of moments, the third eye drawn from both, or either, and between the front and back, the edge. Imaginary and real, fantastic and mundane, possibilities sublimely rendered in comedic instants tucked into the mind as wayposts.
The footnotes on the negotiations of the battle of the tables were such a perfect insert, to illustrate the march of hallucination, that becomes the history of an event, after everyone, with a memory of it gone. The proposed setting is the nature of perception. Even-handedness is at its best incarnation, where the exchange of the sane, and the imaginary across the same space, glare incredulously at each other.
This is a book you will find easy to read. On one hand, it is a travel narrative that moves through layers of history and space. Here are familial gangster-kindled koans, old beach vistas, strange relatives, and people with wonderful names. Bicycles, cars, airplanes, Greyhounds, and thumbs crisscross the neural maps—places you can only find through the author’s plan of the oft-unplanned. A recount demanded!
Peace, on the other hand, in the narrator’s mind, is a sticky, messy affair that we code with the restless truth of self-doubt, the enigma of memory, the placation of grift, guilt, and potential harm to oneself and others—a comedy in the error of some odd gene editing by the great bean counter.
—Ken Kawaji, poet emeritus, Kaldi’s Coffeehouse Bookstore
Excerpt
I rushed through the house, my face twisted, pulling long fingers through shaggy, shoulder-length, brown hair.
“Fuck this! I need shoes! Shoes!”
I took off my worn, desert boots on the porch and threw them at the woodpile, pulled off blue, cotton socks, snagging them on long, well-manicured fingernails. I had worked on my nails all morning before walking to the wedding. I drank bourbon neat, sampled champagne, listened to a string quartet and ate my fill, then walked three miles home. My father shut the screen door, its loose, aluminum frame rattling as it closed. He stood tall, white-bearded, a strap held his glasses snug to his head; my mother stood behind him.
“You can’t come in,” he said.
“Will you go to the Emergency Room?” she asked, her brown eyes flickering with resolve, salt and pepper hair in disarray.
I picked a four-foot-long stick off the woodpile, test swung it, then shouted, “What the fuck for? I need shoes.” My jeans were torn at the knees, white threads hanging.
Author
Steven Paul Lansky wrote Main St. (2002) and Eleven Word Title for Confessional Political Poetry Originally Composed for Radio (2009), published by Seaweed Sideshow Circus. His audionovel Jack Acid (2004) is available on Spotify. His memoir: The Break (Arbitrary Press 2022) had chapters previously published under the title: the citizen, in The Brooklyn Rail (2005), ArtSpike, CityBeat, Streetvibes and Article 25. His animated videos: Bratwurst (with Leigh Waltz), Exit Strategy, Harvest, and The Broken Finger Episode A-8 or the Cigarette Break are on YouTube channel: lanskysp. For more: Whole Terrain, New Flash Fiction Review, Black Clock 20, and St. Petersburg Review Issue 8.5. The novella, A Black Bird Fell Out of the Sky was published on Seaweed Sideshow Circus (2017). Life is a Fountain, a collection of vignettes and sketches was published by Dos Madres Press in 2018. Published under the heteronym, Paul Thanas, and illustrated by Steven Paul Lansky, And Then the Cow Was Drownded (2024) is his latest novel on Arbitrary Press. Original art, links to writings, the music of Lansky’s harmonica heteronym, Flem Snopes and other tidbits are all at www.stevenpaullansky.com
