YA! & John-Juan (American Literature (Dalkey Archive)) - Softcover

Well-respected throughout his career, Douglas Woolf created some of the most startlingly original works of the twentieth century. The two novels collected here create a dreamlike vision of America where helplessness prevails and the actions of the sane seem tinged with madness.

Ya! takes place during the Christmas reunion of a penniless novelist and his teenage daughter at the nightmarish home of a super-American family;John-Juan begins with an amnesiac who finds himself in a Mexican border town with only his pajamas and watch before becoming part of a surreal and somewhat frightening community organized around "runners" that collect trash along the highways.

Douglas Woolf published ten novels and collections of short stories before his death in 1992. His 1978 collectionFuture Preconditional won the first American Book Award for fiction. Woolf has been associated both with the Black Mountain writers - including Charles Olson, Ed Dorn, Jonathan Williams, and Fielding Dawson, among others - as well as the infamous Beats.