Celebrity Blurbs

 Russian existentialism dwells on two questions: “What to do?” and “Who is to blame?” Jonathan Shaw replaces them with: “What else can I do?” and “For the good and the bad, I take responsibility for all!” Which, at the end of the day, sums up a living example of human undestructability that’s hard to surpass.  When I […]

….Kerouac is on the verge of a stroke trying to follow the beat, Baudelaire horrified, shaking like a little girl – and Bukowski can’t get enough from the fish-ass taste on his tongue: Narcisa, Our Lady of Ashes is here and she is yanking them out of their rotten graves to rape them with to […]

I picked up Narcisa at bedtime, thinking that, like many books people give me, it would literally bore me to sleep. Quite the contrary! I stayed up, compulsively turning the pages, and read the whole thing in one night! Wow! What a story! How the author lived to tell it, only Jesus knows. Jonathan Shaw […]

Narcisa left me feeling the sting of a brass-knuckled hook to the jaw. The pain comes on like a storm. But masterfully. At the precise point I can’t bear any more, it tackles me with a beautiful kiss. It’s a winderful feeling of pain and beauty that screams and sings to me at the same […]

Reading NARCISA: OUR LADY OF ASHES is like sliding into the world your parents warned you about. Jonathan Shaw‘s had his knife on the pulse of the underworld for over thirty years. Now he’s cut it open, for all to taste the filth. Wanna be thrown against a brick wall of words? Crack this book… […]

CONGRATULATIONS TO NOAH LEVINE AND HIS BEAUTIFUL WIFE AMY FIELDS  ON THEIR SOON TO BE BABY GIRL, HAZEL. Narcisa is the confession of a hungry ghost, the insatiable, the unloved core of humanity’s deepest sorrow. The addiction to suffering, which is the self-created Hell realm so vividly described in these pages. This beautifully written, brutally […]

An authentic and colorful novel like NARCISA can only be produced by an individual who has experienced an authentic and colorful existence. Few have dipped so deeply or functioned so extensively in the cultural underbelly of our world than the notorious artist and adventurer, Jonathan Shaw. In this literary firmament he is a virtuoso. – […]

Thanks to a Godfather of high-end lowbrow, Joe Coleman, for your blurb.”A writer of immense passion and soul, a true survivor who has painstakingly documented an archtypal descent into the various hells of this festering disease of a planet, Jonathan Shaw has the courage to vivisect his own soul. And what pours out is a […]

In 1980 I lived in Stockholm, Sweden with Arab refugees from Afghanistan, Palestine and Syria…. my favorite books were Papillon and the stories of Fanny Hill in Finnish. I only knew Finnish. One day somebody gave me Kerouac’s On The Road and Junky by Burroughs in English and I started to learn that curious language… […]

“Jonathan Shaw’s passionate descriptions of the surreal, paranoid jungle he inhabits capture the haunting poetry of his soul…Scabvendor is an original and compelling work…” -Hubert Selby Jr. 2003, Author of Reqiuem For a Dream and Last Exit To Brooklyn