Tripmaster Monkey — Maxine Hong Kingston

Wittman Ah Sing is a young Chinese-American hippie in San Francisco during the late sixties. Named after America's quintessential poet, indomitably garrulous and free-spirited, Wittman is as American as James Dean. Yet he also bears a striking resemblance to Monkey, the trickster-saint of Chinese legend who helped bring the Buddhist scriptures from India. Driven by his dream of writing and staging an epic production of interwoven Chinese novels and folktales, Wittman's life becomes an extraordinary journey through an era as fantastic as his ambition -- told in a novel by turns surreal, exuberantly charged with spectacle, violence, and Chinese "talk-story," and wildly, bitterly funny.