<p>East Brother, a literary novel, tells the story of Jess Cooper, a Navy seaman gone AWOL, and his uncle Milo, the last hippie in East Brother, a fictional beach town in Southern California, as both struggle for moral purpose at the end of an era. It offers a realist sense of place as well as the pleasures of the tall tale, character-driven lyricism, and an elegiac social vision of an America that is slowly unraveling its myths.</p>
<p>After dropping acid on leave and landing first in the brig, then in a psychiatric ward, Jess takes refuge with his uncle Milo, thinking he might be able to help figure out what to do next: return to face the music or run away from a pointless life...and from himself. Milo knows a lot about running away. He's been doing it for a long time. Both of them feel trapped between escape and belonging, fantasy and commitment. Looking for a little more self-knowledge over the next three days, they get help from characters like Jack the Cat, a heroin addict who thinks he may have been an international drug lord; Harry Contento, a Machiavellian real estate mogul; Olive Moll, a street kid living on the edge; and Gaspar Zuniga, a forger of Francisco de Zurbaran paintings. By the end, both come face to face with the lies they tell themselves and a truth that is finally much stranger than fiction. </p>

East Brother

Literature & Fiction

Mattessich, Stefan

Humor & Satire

Atopon Books

The Riverbed

Literary

For Thomas Pynchon, the characteristic features of late capitalism—the rise of the military-industrial complex, consumerism, bureaucratization and specialization in the workplace, standardization at all levels of social life, and the growing influence of the mass media—all point to a transformation in the way human beings experience time and duration. Focusing on Pynchon’s novels as representative artifacts of the postwar period, Stefan Mattessich analyzes this temporal transformation in relation not only to Pynchon’s work but also to its literary, cultural, and theoretical contexts.Mattessich theorizes a new kind of time—subjective displacement—dramatized in the parody, satire, and farce deployed through Pynchon’s oeuvre. In particular, he is interested in showing how this sense of time relates to the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. Examining this movement as an instance of flight or escape and exposing the beliefs behind it, Mattessich argues that the counterculture’s rejection of the dominant culture ultimately became an act of self-cancellation, a rebellion in which the counterculture found itself defined by the very order it sought to escape. He points to parallels in Pynchon’s attempts to dramatize and enact a similar experience of time in the doubling-back, crisscrossing, and erasure of his writing. Mattessich lays out a theory of cultural production centered on the ethical necessity of grasping one’s own susceptibility to discursive forms of determination.

Lines of Flight: Discursive Time and Countercultural Desire in the Work of Thomas Pynchon (Post-Contemporary Interventions)

History & Criticism

Duke University Press

Point Guard

Teen & Young Adult

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Books by Mattessich, Stefan