Shelfology Book Pairing

FSG 80th Anniversary Special Edition

by Tom Wolfe

One of the most essential works on the 1960s counterculture, Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Test ushered in an era of New Journalism. An evergreen classic that broke open the possibilities of creative nonfiction, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is Tom Wolfe’s seminal New Journalist portrait of a counterculture in formation and a nation undergoing constant flux. Wolfe follows Ken Kesey, one of the most magnetic figures of the 1960s, as he travels America with his band of Merry Pranksters, experimenting with psychedelics, running into Hells Angels, and bridging the gap between 1950s Beats and a burgeoning hippie movement. With curious and energetic prose, Wolfe tells the story of a new age in American culture while forever expanding our understanding of what journalism might be.

by Ernest Hemingway

In 1937 Ernest Hemingway traveled to Spain to cover the civil war there for the North American Newspaper Alliance. Three years later he completed the greatest novel to emerge from “the good fight,” For Whom the Bell Tolls. The story of Robert Jordan, a young American in the International Brigades attached to an antifascist guerilla unit in the mountains of Spain, it tells of loyalty and courage, love and defeat, and the tragic death of an ideal. In his portrayal of Jordan's love for the beautiful Maria and his superb account of El Sordo's last stand, in his brilliant travesty of La Pasionaria and his unwillingness to believe in blind faith, Hemingway surpasses his achievement in The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms to create a work at once rare and beautiful, strong and brutal, compassionate, moving, and wise. “If the function of a writer is to reveal reality,” Maxwell Perkins wrote to Hemingway after reading the manuscript, “no one ever so completely performed it.” Greater in power, broader in scope, and more intensely emotional than any of the author's previous works, it stands as one of the best war novels of all time.