My first satyrnalia
Item
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Title
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My first satyrnalia
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Description
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One of two Michael Rumaker (1932-2019) books seized, this novel follows a narrator through a night in New York, on the streets, in the bookshops and in “make-out booths”. The narrator’s ultimate destination is an apartment where a Fairy (Faerie) Circle is gathering for the Saturnalia of the book’s title, an “orgiastic celebration” of the Winter Solstice. The Fairy Circle refers to a meeting of the Radical Faeries, a countercultural movement founded in 1979. The novel is scattered with references to non-fictional locations, books and music, including the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop on Christopher Street, Donna Summer and Arthur Evans’s book ‘Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture’ (also seized in ‘Operation Tiger’). The novel, therefore, provides a sense of gay culture in Greenwich Village as it was forty years ago.
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Rights
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All images within the Seized Books! Online exhibition are to be used exclusively for the promotion of the library and to facilitate research. If you download and subsequently share any images from the exhibition website, you agree it is your responsibility to ensure appropriate usage is upheld for that image. Commercial use or distribution of this content is not permitted without prior permission of the copyright holder. Copyright to content may be held by authors, artists, or their heirs, or may be in the public domain. Senate House Library does not automatically claim copyright on any images shown in the Seized Books! online exhibition.
