Trouser Press Books & Ira Robbins Present the San Francisco Release Party for David Polonoff’s debut novel WANNABEAT

Trouser Press Books and Ira Robbins will host the San Francisco release party for David Polonoff and his debut novel, WANNABEAT, at Studio Fallout. This free event will feature a Q&A with Polonoff by author and photographer Michael Goldberg along with a group of legendary musicians, artists and writers who represent the storied history of San Francisco’s beat generation and the City’s deep connection to its counterculture past.

Andrei Codrescu, editor of The Stiffest of the Corpse (City Lights), says, "This riveting book joins George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London and Henry Miller’s The Paris Years on the shelf of the timeless call of bohemia to fascinated young dreamers."

Set against the backdrop of a generation awakening from its countercultural dreams to the realities of a materialistic society, WannaBeat (subtitled Hanging Out...and Hanging On...in Baby Beat San Francisco) is an incisive and provocative story about the yearning for authenticity in the face of an increasingly artificial reality.  Living in San Francisco in the late 1970s, Philip Polarov is a writer scraping by on a series of odd jobs while attempting to turn his self-described "stream of drivel" into an Important Novel.  As the last soldiers of the Beat Generation become ghosts in the North Beach neighborhood they put on the map and the Baby Beats, a new clique of their acolytes, take over the bars and coffeehouses, Philip searches for meaning, sex, drugs...and an affordable place to crash.

Former San Francisco resident David Polonoff, now a New York-based writer and chronicler of bohemia, has participated in most of the countercultural movements of the last 50 years, from Haight-Ashbury as a teenager to Punk as a young adult to New York’s recent Dimes Square scene as a generation-fluid boho emeritus, while earning degrees in philosophy from Yale and NYU. His satirical writing on culture and politics appeared regularly in the Village Voice, East Village Eye and New York Newsday in the 1980s/early ‘90s and was later collected in the book Down the Yup Staircase. He was an early blogger about dotcom and IT culture and he started the YouTube channel Big Bad Boris, writing and performing in comedy videos.

Trouser Press Books is a New York-based publisher specializing in quality music journalism and fiction. The roots of the company go back to 1974, when three friends launched a rock and roll fanzine. Trouser Press existed for ten years and spawned a series of acclaimed record guides published by major houses. The contents of those books later formed the basis for the Trouser Press website, which remains active as an online music publication, a fully indexed magazine archive and more.