Set against the backdrop of a generation awakening from its countercultural dreams to the realities of a materialistic society, WannaBeat is an incisive and provocative coming-of-age story that can speak to the youth of today in their yearning for authenticity in the face of an increasingly artificial reality. Living in San Francisco in the late 1970s, Philip Polarov is a writer scraping by on a series of odd jobs while attempting to turn his self-described "stream of drivel" into an Important Novel.

As the last soldiers of the Beat Generation become ghosts in the North Beach neighborhood they put on the map and the Baby Beats, a new clique of their acolytes, take over the bars and coffeehouses, Philip searches for meaning, sex, drugs . .

. and an affordable place to crash.

Advance praise for WannaBeat:David Polonoff vividly captures a time and place, San Francisco in the ’70s — some of the same territory visited by Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad. —Joel Selvin, author and journalist (San Francisco Chronicle)This riveting book joins George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London and Henry Miller’s The Paris Years on the shelf of the timeless call of bohemia to fascinated young dreamers.

—Andrei Codrescu, editor of The Stiffest of the Corpse (City Lights Books)Attention all Kerouac/Beat Generation fans: BEFORE you try to move to San Francisco’s North Beach, Read This Book first! Then, all bets are off!—V. Vale, RE/Search and Search & Destroy founderHaving begun my San Francisco experience in Mrs.

Vasquez’s rooming house after coming here to attend SFAI, and “walking in the same shoes” as the author, I can attest to the veracity of these tales. —Marian Wallace, RE/Search Pass-the-potatoes fiction, with no scrimp in the starch.

Genuwine, authentic. GIMME GIMME SPUDS, JACK!—Richard Meltzer, author of A Whore Like All the RestWannaBeat is excellent social history, a portrait of a city that was still a sanctuary for anti-materialism .

. .

a rich memoir of a very special place, where dreams flowered even if they didn’t always come true. —Dennis McNally, author of A Long Strange TripPolonoff spins ultimately edifying tales of a bright young smartass on the make in this wickedly witty and delightfully self-mocking novel.

—Richard Gehr, author of I Only Read It for the Cartoons: The New Yorker’s Most Brilliantly Twisted ArtistsDavid Polonoff describes the late ’70s/early ’80s San Francisco beat-to-punk world I lived in with a lighthearted profundity that many have tried — but few have come closer to capturing as well. —Howie Klein, co-founder of 415 Records, former president of Reprise Records.