A revealing portrait of a major poet of the SF Renaissance and a gripping account of late '50s gay life.

In Black Mountain Days, Michael Rumaker has written a touching, poetic memoir of Black Mountain College from 1952 to 1956. What were for the college its final four years were for Rumaker a sequence of journeys of creative and personal discovery that

Fiction. LGBT Studies. Originally published by Grey Fox Press in 1979, Triton Books, the new imprint of Spuyten Duyvil, restores this classic novel to print with a new introduction by the author. "Rumaker an original prose creator of great shamed heroic sensitivity has taken up his pen again to describe a hidden psychological & physical reality. As an old sex fiend from the baths myself I'm grateful & relieved to see thru his eyes and feel thru his body"--Allen Ginsberg.

Michael Rumaker's witty fable blends the marvelous and the murderous as it takes us on a grown-up children's crusade across Manhattan. The object of their pilgrimage -- to destroy the malefactors of the Church. The result -- one grand surprise after another. The Canterbury Tales in reverse for the furious queer 90's.

Michael Rumaker's finely detailed, evocative memoir puts personal flesh on Black Mountain College's historical bones. He brings to life the daily texture of what it meant to live in that remarkable community. Martin Duberman

Fiction. "Mickey seems to see and hear everything, revealing as he does, Michael Rumaker's amazing abilities as a novelist. Rumaker has a wonderful eye for realistic detail and an exceptional ear for dialogue. His ability to create realistic American characters living in 20th century America rivals any American novelist I have ever read. PAGAN DAYS is one of the best novels I've read in a lifetime of reading. Michael Rumaker is a working-class Marcel Proust, a great novelist, inspired by memory to write this truly memorable novel."--Anne Geismar "Mickey's days as a 'pagan' open his eyes to an almost mystical, but certainly aesthetic, view of the world where each experience, no matter how difficult or painful, offers him a vision that will carry him through life. PAGAN DAYS enriches our literature, and reinforces that the avant-garde need not be unintelligible to communicate the complexity of being human. Rumaker's characters breathe like Rodin's figures--they are alive, real, sinewy, torn, ecstatic, and transformative."--Jeffery Beam