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Fug You: An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore, the Fuck You Press, the Fugs, and Counterculture in the Lower East Side

by Ed Sanders

Fug You is Ed Sanders’s unapologetic and often hilarious account of eight key years of “Total Assault on the Culture,” to quote his friend William S. Burroughs.

Fug You traces the flowering years of New York’s downtown bohemia in the Sixties, starting with the marketing problems presented by the title of Sanders’s underground magazine (Fuck You/A Magazine of the Arts) as it faced the scrutiny of the aboveground, including an arrest after a raid on Sanders’s Peace Eye Bookstore, when the arresting officer demanded to look for evidence of Akhenaten’s “Hymn to the Sun Disk” on the author’s privates.

Sanders recalls the ups and downs of running the Peace Eye Bookstore, home of both the world’s first underground comic art exhibition and Lemar, the Committee to Legalize Marijuana. The memoir also traces the career of the Fugs, founded in 1964 by Sanders and his neighbor, the legendary Tuli Kupferberg (in his lifetime, often called “the world’s oldest living hippie” by Allen Ginsberg), as Sanders strives to find a home for this seminal, postmodern, innovative folk rock band in the big time world of record labels.

Full of encounters with a veritable who’s who of downtown New York and the counterculture beyond it (Lenny Bruce, Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa, Andy Warhol, Pete Seeger, Ken Kesey, Charles Olson, George Plimpton, Abbie Hoffman, and the Grateful Dead, just to name a few), Fug You is an illustrated history of social change in the Sixties, as told by the man at the center of it all.

New York City Literary Agency

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