Praise for the Freak Scene Dream Trilogy, including Untitled
Oral prose. School of Twain and Salinger. It’s improvised, and its immediate and delayed echoes, its ellipses, its obsessions, make music. LARRY BECKETT, author of Morning Glory and Paul Bunyan
Michael Goldberg’s sharply drawn characters, vivid musical nods, and keen eye for detail transport us back to the post-countercultural mid-1970s when sex and drugs and rock & roll were a way of life. In this third installment of the Freak Scene Dream Trilogy, antihero Writerman takes us along for the rollercoaster ride - angel dust, anyone? - while he tries to make sense of a life littered with broken hearts. A page-turner. HOLLY GEORGE-WARREN, author of A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton
Relive the 1970s - the music, the dope, the clothes, the books, the confused and restless sexual politics - in all their filthy glory. MARIA BUSTILLOS, author of Dorkismo: the Macho of the Dork and Act Like a Gentleman, Think Like a Woman.
Michael Goldberg is comparable to Kerouac in a 21st century way, someone trying to use that language and energy and find a new way of doing it. MARK MORDUE, author of Dastgah: Diary of a Head Trip
Goldberg presents us with a beautiful evocation of the Seventies where the music wasn’t just the soundtrack to our lives but the auteur of them. Writerman, our hero, drinks and drugs and dances to the nightingale tune while birds fly high by the light of the moon. Oh, oh, oh, oh Writerman! LARRY RATSO SLOMAN, author of On the Road with Bob Dylan
Radioactive as Godzilla. RICHARD MELTZER, author of The Aesthetics of Rock
Penned in a staccato amphetamine grammar, its narrative is fractured and deranged, often unsettling but frequently compelling, an unsparing portrait of the teen condition: assured then despairing, would-be sex god then impotent has-been, an only child battling the wills of his domineering father and interfering mom in the anonymous, suburban fringes of Marin County. SIMON WARNER, author of Text and Drugs and Rock'n'Roll: The Beats and Rock Culture
So who is this protagonist anyway? Holden Caulfield meets Lord Buckley? PAUL KRASSNER, author of Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut: Misadventures in the Counterculture
‘True Love Scars’ reads like a fever dream from the dying days of the Summer of Love. Keyed to a soundtrack of love and apocalypse, Writerman pitches headlong into a haze of drugs, sex and confusion in search of what no high can bring: his own redemption. Read it and be transformed. ALINA SIMONE, author of Note to Self and You Must Go and Win
True Love Scars is deeply dialed in to rock’s dichotomy of enlightening powers versus stonered party time. GREG M. SCHWARTZ, PopMatters Michael Goldberg reminds us of the difficulties of remaining true to our own visions amidst the powerful exigencies of young adulthood. JOLIE HOLLAND, recording artist, whose albums include Catalpa, Escondida and The Living and the Dead