Punk Elegies arrives like a chemically unstable mixture of Richard Yates and Damon Runyon. Set along Hollywood Boulevard at the birth of punk and the death of the seventies, the thirty-three melancholic, comic laments of Punk Elegies are a mesmerizing concoction of delusion and revelation. A cultural moment, a marriage, and one young man's mind and soul spiral through a series of boundless possibilities and arrive at a harrowing finality. In the end, on the spin cycle of destiny, MacDonell circles alone, naked and bewildered in the labyrinth of a pre-AIDS bathhouse inferno. The first sunrise of the rest of his life dares him to step outside.
Allan MacDonell is the author of Prisoner of X: 20 Years in the Hole at Hustler Magazine and was a defining voice of the groundbreaking punk periodical Slash magazine. While writing for Slash, he also co-invented slam-dancing. MacDonell lives in Los Angeles.
"Set in the glittering ruins of late 1970s Hollywood, MacDonell's coming-of-age tale tracks the rise and folly of L.A. punk. Searing, comic and self-immolating, Elegies ultimately becomes a love letter to lost time." --Evan Wright, Generation Kill and Hella Nation
