Tag Archives: F. Scott Fitzgerald

Rock’s Back Pages ‘Rock Critic Excerpt’ From “The Flowers Lied”

RBP - final 2

Those awesome editors at Rock’s Back Pages have featured me and an excerpt from my new rock novel, The Flowers Lied, on the home page of their site.

In the excerpt. which is the third chapter of the book. the narrator, Michael Stein AKA Writerman, meets two of his rock critic heroes for the first time when he visits them at The Pad, the rather decrepit apartment where both critics live and work.

The introduction to the excerpt begins:

Michael Goldberg’s rock ‘n’ roll coming-of-age novel, The Flowers Lied, has just been published. Richard Meltzer wrote that Goldberg’s first novel, True Love Scars, was “Radioactive as Godzilla.” Goldberg has been called a “21st Century Kerouac” by Kerouac biographer Dennis McNally and compared to Lester Bangs by Rolling Stone. The new novel focuses on Writerman (Michael Stein) a sophomore at The University, which is located in Northern California on hill above a beach town not unlike Santa Cruz. He’s a music freak and wannabe writer – he struggles with a Captain Beefheart album review, and tries and fails to type a single word of the Great American Novel he is so desperate to write. He pursues a hip but traumatized 18-year-old artist named Elise, who introduces him to tequila and Almaden Red. And he becomes best friends with Jim AKA Thee Freakster Bro, the over-the-top, gregarious writer/poet/music obsessive stoner he first meets in True Love Scars.

Read the entire excerpt at Rock’s Back Pages. Enjoy!

– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post –

Uncensored Collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald Short Stories To Be Published

Scott & Zelda.

A new edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Taps at Reveille” is the latest volume of “The Cambridge Edition of the Works of F Scott Fitzgerald.”

It will be published in the U.S. on May 31, 2014.

The stories were written by Fitzgerald in the 1920s and 1930s for publication in the Saturday Evening Post.

The stories were edited and all of the sex, drugs, inebriation and antisemitic sluts were removed.

General editor James West, Sparks Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University, tole The Guardian he thinks this new edition is important “because we want to read what Fitzgerald wrote, not what the editors at the Post thought he should have written”.

“Before these stories were bowdlerised, they contained antisemitic slurs, sexual innuendo, instances of drug use and drunkenness,” said West, Sparks. “They also contained profanity and mild blasphemy. The texts were scrubbed clean at the Post.”

For more of this story, head to The Guardian.

It kills me that one of my fave authors was antisemitic. And so was Hemingway. Damn

– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –-