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  • Published: 28 May 2018
  • ISBN: 9781784873721
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 368
  • RRP: $35.00

The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby




The first of Tom Wolfe's genre-defining non-fiction books, reissued to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

Tom Wolfe's debut collection of essays - a brilliant, form-bending dive into the future of America as it careened through the 1960s

In 1965, Tom Wolfe dropped like a bomb onto the American literary scene with his first book, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, an incandescent panorama of American counter-culture, its dances, bouffant hairdos, customised cars and rock concerts. Capturing the energy of the age in its portraits of Phil Spector, Cassius Clay, Las Vegas and the Nanny Mafia – as well as asking, why do doormen hate Volkswagens? – Wolfe’s flamboyant essay collection remains one of the great, revolutionary landmarks of modern non-fiction.

'Journalism, it is said, is the first draft of history. Nobody exemplifies the dictum better than Wolfe, the cultural observer and social critic par excellence' Daily Telegraph

  • Published: 28 May 2018
  • ISBN: 9781784873721
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 368
  • RRP: $35.00

About the author

Tom Wolfe

Tom Wolfe (1930-2018) was the author of more than a dozen books, among them The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Right Stuff, The Bonfire of the Vanities, A Man in Full, I Am Charlotte Simmons and Back to Blood. He received the National Book Foundation's 2010 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

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Praise for The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby

He impales trends and fads, pretensions and swaggerings, with needle-sharp wit

Sunday Times

A great example of how the genre cocked a snook at journalistic convention

Metro

Tom Wolfe is a terrific writer

Washington Monthly

This is a book that will be a sharp pleasure to reread years from now, when it will bring back, like a falcon in the sky of memory, a whole world that is currently jetting, or jazzing, its way to somewhere or other

Newsweek

You only had to look at him… or read such books as The Bonfire of the Vanities and The Right Stuff to know that Tom Wolfe was like no other

John Pye, The Scotsman

Journalism, it is said, is the first draft of history. Nobody exemplifies the dictum better than Wolfe, the cultural observer and social critic par excellence

Mick Brown, Daily Telegraph

Effortlessly, elegantly, Tom Wolfe bestrode both fiction and non-fiction… a style at once objective, subjective, and hallucinatory

Andy Martin, Independent

[Tom Wolfe’s] gleeful use of punctuation and italics, along with entertaining asides and neologisms that often quickly cemented themselves into the English lexicon, helped Wolfe stand out from other journalists

Guardian

[Wolfe] made literature fun and bores don’t like fun

Freddy Gray, The Catholic Herald

This is a book that will be a sharp pleasure to reread years from now, when it will bring back, like a falcon in the sky of memory, a whole world that is currently jetting and jazzing its way somewhere or other

Newsweek

He impales trends and fads, pretensions and swaggerings, with needle-sharp wit

Sunday Times

Might well be required reading in courses with names like American studies

TIME Magazine