I Just Hitched in from the Coast

This rollicking collectionpersonally selected by the author (in collaboration with his editor Tom Marksbury)gathers the best of Ed McClanahan''s work making it a musthave for both longtime fans and newcomers alike. Comprised of fourteen works I Just Hitched in from the Coast is an admixture of fiction and nonfiction memoir and imagination. It includes such classics as Fondelle or: The Whore with a Heart of Gold and the wry essay The Day the Lampshades Breathed chronicling McClanahan''s time in the 1960s.. . In The Essentials of Western Civilization McClanahan imagines the affairs of Assistant Professor Harrison B. Eastep MA of Arbuckle State in Oregon and of the gradual erosion of his dedication to academia. Weaving together Vietnam rock and roll a lackluster counterculture past and the Great Plague of London this is storytelling at its best by a master of the craft.. . The foremost stylist of the Yippie generation McClanahan writes with bemused affection. He parlays his Southern sensibilities and California experiences with a mastery of language to tantalize his readers with musings that are absurd whimsical outrageous and in the words of one reviewer wickedly sharp.