Three dramatic and emblematic stories intertwine in Zachary Lazar's extraordinary new novel, SWAY--the early days of the Rolling Stones, including the romantic triangle of Brian Jones, Anita Pallenberg, and Keith Richards; the life of avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger; and the community of Charles Manson and his followers. Lazar illuminates an hour in American history when rapture found its roots in idolatrous figures and led to unprovoked and inexplicable violence. Connecting all the stories in this novel is Bobby Beausoleil, a beautiful California boy who appeared in an Anger film and eventually joined the Manson "family." With great artistry, Lazar weaves scenes from these real lives together into a true but heightened reality, making superstars human, giving demons reality, and restoring mythic events to the scale of daily life. Zachary Lazar, who took his title from the Keith Richards song of the same name on the Sticky Fingers album, was an infant in the closing years of the 1960s. He therefore writes from copious research rather than memory, but the novel seems to be the appropriate form for his story. Several critics expressed surprise that there could be anything new to say about the overanalyzed decade, but with the exception of the Toronto Star , they agreed that Lazar offers fresh insight into the era’s more ominous undercurrents. Critics praised his vivid, sparkling prose and his success in depicting characters already so well known, as he strips them bare of myth and legend and renders them completely human. “Lazar makes the atmosphere of a decade almost palpable,” claims the Boston Globe , and readers just may forget that Sway is a work of fiction. Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. "Joseph Conrad said that fiction is primarily a visual art; he would have loved Zachary Lazar's Sway for the thousand indelible visual details of a startling originality--and for Lazar's ability to shine a light into the contemporary heart of darkness." ( Edmund White, author of "A Boy's Own Story" ) " Sway is a gripping and masterful novel about the Manson murders, the early years of the Rolling Stones, Kenneth Anger, and the dark heart of the 1960s." ( Akhil Sharma, author of "An Obedient Father," winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award ) "[Lazar] brilliantly highlights the fragility of an era when "everyone under thirty has decided that they're an exception-a musician, a runaway, an artist, a star." ( Publishers Weekly (starred review) ) "Zachary Lazar's superb second novel, Sway, reads like your parents' nightmare idea of what would happen to you if you fell under the spell of rock 'n' roll...Elegant and intricate...this brilliant novel is about what's to be found in the shadows, the most terrifying crannies of twisted souls, the darkest gleaming gems." ( New York Times Book Review Charles Taylor ) "Lazar has created a powerful, infernal prism through which to view the potent, still-rippling contradictions of the late '60s. It's no mean feat. Despite the era's nearly impossible richness, fresh insights are hard to come by." ( Los Angeles Times Book Review Mark Rozzo ) "One hypnotic tone poem.... It is not the now-historic acts of violence that make Sway so riveting, but its vivid character portraits and decadent, muzzy atmosphere, all rendered with the heightened sensory awareness associated with drugs and paranoia. The near miniaturist precision with which he describes Keith Richards's attempts to master his guitar, Brian Jones's acid trips and Anger's obsessive desire for Beausoleil bring this large-scale tableau into stunning relief." ( Time Out New York Liz Brown ) "The novel moves swiftly, and Lazar handles the numerous segues from one story to another with a veteran film editor's finesse.... The ending has a powerful kick, and we're still hearing its echoes. A skillful dramatization of the consequences of making and inhabiting your own world. The Stones ought to write a song about it." ( Kirkus Reviews ) "Blending fact and myth, novelist Lazar casts the Rolling Stones, the Manson family and avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger as characters in his dizzying, foreboding shadow history of the Sixties." ( Rolling Stone, Best New Rock Books, 2008 ) "Zachary Lazar's novel Sway makes a convincing case that dark forces can be summoned with the right incantation...this is the story of a bizarre convergence of real lives overlapping.... It's about the compulsion to find the edge by plunging over it." ( Austin American-Statesman Patrick Beach ) "Zachary Lazar begins where Didion left off in his fiercely imagined, kaleidoscopic novel." ( Rolling Stone Jonathan Ringen ) "As a painter might do with a brush and canvas, Lazar uses words in his new novel Sway to fashion a restrained but seductive portrait of lives intersecting in the tumultuous 1960s." ( Newsday Stephen Williams ) "Lazar's mode of engaging the volatile decade...is marvelously unexpected. He does not attempt