![]() ![]() Once there, he finds a deteriorating situation, with a stable of American journalists on the verge of career and/or life transitions, who spend most of their time drinking rum, hustling for cash, and fomenting plans to flee the island once the paper folds. ![]() ![]() The novel’s protagonist is Paul Kemp, a freelancing journalist from New York who travels to Puerto Rico to work on The Daily News, a newspaper hemorrhaging money. I’ve always enjoyed his cutting language and stories that hover somewhere between an American Dream quest and an Altamont-style erosion of the hippie ideal, writing that exposes the grit below the surface sheen. The story was also adapted for a movie starring Johnny Depp, released in 2011.Īs something by way of disclosure, Thompson was a major influence on my writing and so there might be a little natural bias towards his work. Thompson had archived the manuscript after seven rejections from publishers and then became too swept up in the politics of the ‘60s to further pursue its publication. ![]() This novel has the shadow of legend behind it in that it’s something of a “lost novel,” having been written while Thompson was a 22-year-old writer in early 1960s Puerto Rico but not published until 1998, after actor Johnny Depp discovered it among Thompson’s papers. ![]()
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