'Wisdom's Maw: The Acid Novel' Goes 'Live' via Kindle

By: Nov. 02, 2013
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"Wisdom's Maw: The Acid Novel" [Far Gone Books, 1996]suppressed in the early- to mid-1990s to publishers' concerns of potential libel, as well as of information contained within, which the Intelligence community deemed "not for public consumption"has been released via Kindle: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FSG7NCE

"Wisdom's Maw" began as an investigative journalistic effort for High Times magazine in 1990, its author Todd Brendan Fahey then earning a Master's degree in Professional Writing at University of Southern California; Fahey had set for himself the goal of opening the lid on one "Captain" Alfred M. Hubbarda former OSS agent who imported 100% of America's LSD from Sandoz Laboratories in Switzerland in the very early 1950s and would turn on Aldous Huxley and Timothy Leary to their first-ever acid trips. Al Hubbard became a real-life Johnny Appleseed of LSD and is a central protagonist within "Wisdom's Maw." Fahey's exhaustive journalistic effort found its way into the November 1991 issue of High Times [http://www.fargonebooks.com/high.html] and would soon spawn a novel.

The published article, "The Original Captain Trips," gained the attention of Hunter S. Thompson's publicist, William Stankey, who would represent Fahey for nearly five years and to no avail. Nearly every major publisher in New York had read the manuscript of "Wisdom's Maw" by end-1995 and all deemed it "subversive, untouchable and potentially libelous," as major charactersnames changed but still livingspanned, among others: Ken Kesey, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary and Sidney Gottlieb (Director of the CIA's Project MK-Ultra; the LSD and mind control experiments upon which this novel is based).

"Wisdom's Maw: The Acid Novel," nearly two decades hence and having been published independently via Far Gone Books in 1996, is considered now an underground classic. The 1st and only print edition was reviewed to 5-star acclaim within The Village Voice, High Times and a host of underground magazines, 'zines and campus newspapers.

The novel's "back cover blurb" was penned by Ernest J. Gaines (The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman; A Lesson Before Dying), recipient of a MacArthur "Genius" Grant; Pulitzer Prize nominee and winner of the John Dos Passos Award.

With a resurgence of interest in psychedelics for medical and therapeutic use and a shift in attitudes concerning the "War On [some] Drugs," Todd Brendan Fahey's "Wisdom's Maw: The Acid Novel" sheds light on the origins of the US government's interest in LSD and its key role in the coming counterculture.


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