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American Fool's Day is an open invitation to enjoy a timely epic farce. Enter, a quantum perversity of civilization. This novel for the 2020's is set in the 1930's when Duke The Suit is mysteriously warped into a 1939 film noire just as the explosive cusp of new and advanced technology grips power through propaganda to darkly galvanize a world throttled by totalitarianism, poverty and the hell shadows of global war. They haunt the blinding carnival lights of a surreal, absurd and decadent Hollywood fabricating and cloning their own realities of race, class and gender - beyond the traps of tribal identity politics. From corny Main Street to horny Wall Street, the thorns of D.C. hurtle us on a runaway rollercoaster yet to stop. We are entangled in a spiraling cascade of plots and coups where the real underlying conspiracy has always been the super rich toying against the poor with the subsequent buffering of the deadly carnage unfolding in between by the electrified cash crazy casino economy of a kleptocratic plutocracy fully invested in mesmerizing the star gazing public. We plow through the play of language to tackle the hyperbole of twisted swill - euphemism for an unscrupulous and clandestine demagoguery poking right in the camel's eye! To confront this amorphous hydra of wicked forces Duke the Suit joins the legendary and heroic Jazz musician Louis Armstrong, actress and inventor Hedy Lamarr and the prolific and resurrected Marx Brothers in an exposition of their outrageous shenanigans in slapstick dialogue and acrobatics ever. AFD is a literary metaphor for the year 2020 - a scarred and paranoid decade cutting us deeper still as the film within the story reflects back to us the 1930's when many of our worst issues and paradigms took root. This book asks the big questions conveyed through compelling angles of an expansive spectrum of mirrored details. It does not peddle nor pander for a political party or ideology but rather dives into a wider perspective by which we can step back and embrace a challenged democracy with our bunkered neighbors. We are spared the red horizon spelling disasters of an uncivil war, competing dictatorships, or a global apocalypse ignited by our fears of "The Other" thus averting a perverse polarization of all illusions to divide and conquer to sink from opiated distraction, to a nameless grave. If we crave more than hope for tomorrow, we need to learn the facts of the past- today! Here is a musical journey through literary prose.

René Daumal (b. 1908) is best known for his novel Mt. Analogue, unfinished at his death, in 1944 (other works in English include A Night of Serious Drinking and The Power of the Word). Daumal was an autodidact, ie. a non-academic, Sanskritist. Following youthful explorations, with poet Gilbert Le Conte (Black Mirror) and initial instruction in Sanskrit from René Guernon, he embarked on a solitary study, surpassed his teacher and eventually formulated his own Sanskrit dictionary. He translated essential texts on Sanskrit composition, poetry in Sanskrit, including the famous hymn concerning SOMA and the first chapter of the Bharatya NatyaSastra, the world's first treatise on the dramatic arts written circa 4th century. Writing numerous essays on Sanskrit poetics his deeply felt intention was to present these texts and the spiritual etymology of the sub-continent in a form accessible to the 'common man', the artists and new societies of the 20th century. As secretary to Uday Shankar, he wrote the first reviews of Indian music and dance in the West (Paris, circa 1935) and accompanied Uday Shankar's troupe, which included Ravi Shankar as a 12 year old dancer to NYC. During the 2nd. World War, exiled in the South of France, with his wife Vera who was Jewish, he furthered his literary work, completing essays, translations, reviews while maintaining, with others so exiled. a profound epistolary exchange (see Letters 1930-1944), until his death from tuberculosis, shortly before the alien landing. RASA, a 'cult classic' edited by Claudio Rugafori, secretary of the Daumal archives and translated by American poet and musician, Louise Landes Levi, has earned its reputation.This is its 3rd. edition, prior editions being New Directions, 1982 and Shivastan 2003 and 2006.

ABOUT THE BOOK Through much of the 19th and 20th centuries, Manhattan below 14th Street was a great cultural brain that dreamed up a fantastic wealth of art and entertainment for the rest of the world. Greenwich Village was one hemisphere, the Lower East Side the other. Across all media and genres, from the loftiest avant-garde to low amusements for the masses, this dream machine changed world culture over and over again.On the Lower East Side, immigrants from around the world mingled with one another, and with artists, writers, musicians and other culture producers. The neighborhood also attracted rebels, eccentrics, visionaries, and refugees from the straight and normal life.Offbeats is a gallery of some great characters from the Lower East Side, a representative handful of visionaries, artists, misfits and criminals. They include Mickey the Pope, who invented an illegal and ingenious pot delivery service; street gang leader-turned-artist Cochise; pioneers of the movie industry, who went from running nickelodeons on the Lower East Side to building Hollywood empires; Father Pat Maloney, an Irish priest jailed for his role in a Brinks heist to help fund the IRA; Baba Raul Canizares, a Santeria priest; Boris Lurie, a concentration camp survivor who cofounded the NO!art movement; mystic and poet Lionel Ziprin; Yiddish theater star Molly Picon; as well as drag artists, street artists, and other creators.Gentrification has ended the Lower East Side that nurtured and attracted these Offbeats. All the more reason to remember and celebrate them through the marvelous stories and photographs in this book.