Season of the Witch

Book excerpt: By the author of Midnight Cowboy: A teenage girl runs away to the East Village in “one of the best and most convincing novels . . . of the Woodstock generation” (Publishers Weekly). As she explains in her diary, seventeen-year-old Gloria Random is running away from her Midwest childhood home. It’s the fall of 1969, and her best friend John has been called up for the draft. It’s time to escape the Big Finger, and their mundane lives. Renaming themselves Witch and Roy, they head to New York City in search of Witch’s biological father. Landing in the East Village, they fall into an underground world of mysticism, drugs, and free love as they burrow further into hiding from the realities they left behind. In his last novel, the iconic author of Midnight Cowboy and All Fall Down captures the heady mix of anxiety and experimentation that permeated New York at the height of the anti-war movement. With his trademark wit and insight, James Leo Herlihy brings together a colorful cast of characters straight from the heart of the countercultural revolution. “A tour de force!” —The New York Times “Herlihy writes with an edge of iron.” —Nelson Algren, National Book Award–winning author of The Man with the Golden Arm