Book dossier

A Beat, a Bong, and a Bang

by Anar Green

It's a long weekend in summer. Costa and his friends go from party to party till the morning after-parties start. There is sex and drugs and beats if you can guest-list your way into enough of them. But looming over the horizon are the weekdays of prefab choices between the hopeless and the impossible, between this little bit of your identity and that. Nothing on TV reflects your reality, and the life it had promised is getting even farther. "A Beat, a Bong and a Bang" is a 60,000-word novel of literary fiction set in the cultural fringe of a contemporary city, telling of twenty-somethings creating their own world when everything is controlled by somebody else. The funny dialogue, graphic sex, and the narrative's changes in viewpoint, hint at inner conflicts--between the identities laid before them, and that which compels them. Their reactions range from amused apathy to vitriolic dissent.