Blue Hand: The Tragicomic, Mind-altering Odyssey Of Allen Ginsberg, A Holy Fool, A Lost Muse, A Dharma Bum, And His Prickly Bride

In this engrossing new piece of Beat history, Pulitzer Prize finalist Deborah Baker takes us back to the moment when America’s edgiest writers looked to India for answers as India looked to the West. It was 1961 when Allen Ginsberg left New York by boat for Bombay, where he hoped to meet poets Gary Snyder and Joanne Kyger. Baker follows Ginsberg and his companions as they travel from ashram to opium den. Exposing an overlooked chapter of the literary past, A Blue Hand will delight all those who continue to cherish the frenzied creativity of the Beats.

“A fabulous book—and written with great verve and nerve— about the Beats and their passage to India.”
— Michael Ondaatje

“[A] dense, exotic, intriguing saga—not just Ginsberg’s but India’s too.”
—National Geographic Adventure

“A piece of devoted scholarship and legwork dunked in the screwy, hyper-intelligent, tragicomic essence of everything that drove Ginsberg to take a trip that not only changed his life but helped spawn generations of hipsters, hippies, writers, artists, rock stars, mental cases, and self-anointed medicine men.”
—The New York Times

Deborah Baker moved to Calcutta in 1990, where she studied Bengali and wrote In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding, a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in biography. Since then, her essays have appeared in a range of publications, from The New York Times to the Calcutta Statesman.

Imprint: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Distributor: Penguin Group USA, Inc
Publication Date: 01-27-2009
Pages: 256
Measurements: 8.34in X 5.14in X 0.68in X 0.47lb