The Night Action — Bruce Douglas Reeves

The Night Action by Bruce Reeves was the last great novel in the canon of Beat literature, published in 1966 just six months after Richard Fariña's Been Down So Long So Long it Looks Up to Me. Like Fariña's novel it can be seen as the link between Beat culture and the more politically-conscious hippie culture of the late-60s and early-70s. The novel careens around the night spots of San Francisco's North Beach and the words seem to fly off the page in the style of Tom Wolfe or the lyrics of Tom Waits. You can almost hear the crack of the pool balls, the neon buzzing, almost smell the cigarette smoke and taste the whisky. Not only was it the last novel of an era, The Night Action serves as an epitaph of the Beat Generation in the same way The Great Gatsby was of the Jazz Era.

Features a new introduction by the author.