By Robert Coe
SURVIVORS OF A FUTURE
that never happened
A Cultural Review: 1974 - 1994
“...an astonishing blend of cultural history, multi-arts criticism, and memoir, moving with dazzling fluency across the hybrid worlds of visual and performance art, dance and music-theater, and experimental just-about-everything... Coe celebrates the mad pioneers of America’s most surreal cultural era in a gorgeous, insightful prose that matches their marvels.”
-Todd London, This Is Not My Memoir (with Andre Gregory, FSG)
“Compiled from published and unpublished writings, this volume reflects Coe’s extraordinary ability to craft smart journalistic profiles of epochal theater and dance artists with the Olympian sweep of an academic researcher and more than a streak of gonzo memoirist.”
- Don Shewey, Critic and Writer
“...a truly personal opus and one that captivates as well as inspires... brimming with imagery and rich pathos that never seem over-indulgent or forced...”
- Robert Buccellato, the US Review
"...a bit of Norman Mailer with a splash of Joan Didion, but all in all, the book has an eclectic style all its own. It’s postmodernism with a smirk and a twinkle. If you were there, you’ll be glad to go back again. If you weren’t there, you’re going to feel as if you were."
- Des McAnuff, playwright, Songwriter, and Director
SURVIVORS OF A FUTURE That Never Happened - a cultural review, 1974-1994 is a collection of essays previously published in Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, American Theater magazine, and Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, by Robert Coe, a journalist, author, playwright, and screenwriter. In these essays, Coe shares his affinity for misfits and the ignored. He loved Golden Boys, extraordinary women, and artists with outlandish ambitions. SURVIVORS OF A FUTURE THAT NEVER HAPPENED is a profile of some of the most extraordinary artists and thinkers who survived the cultural revolutions of the ’60s. The future didn’t exist back then; you had to imagine it. Otherwise, it was all just Now.
