Landmark Vietnam Antiwar Opus to Be Updated and Expanded

Friends, it’s been a long time in coming but I’m pleased to announce that contractual details have been finalized for Michigan State University Press to publish an expanded, revised version of my anthology, Voices from the Underground: Insider Histories of the Vietnam Era Underground Press (Mica Press, 1993). In its new iteration it will appear as four separate books with the first appearing in 2010 followed every six months by another until all four are out.

The book was called “the most important book on American journalism published in my lifetime” by one reviewer (In These Times) and was named one of the five most important books in the field of communication for 1993 (Choice). The Los Angeles Times reviewer said  it “comes closer than anything I’ve yet read to putting the sights, sounds and texture of the ’60s on paper.” Unfortunately, it went out of print long before it reached its potential audience and the small publisher was unable to bring it back.

Voices from the Underground is a series of histories of underground papers from the Vietnam era as told by key people on each of the papers. The underground press was the dissident press of the Vietnam era, the independent press that told the true story, which the corporate papers suppressed, of what our government was doing behind our backs to the Vietnam people in our name and with our tax dollars.

Stories in the first edition of Voices from the Underground represent the gay, lesbian, feminist, Black, Puerto Rican, military, prisoners’ rights, socialist, new age, Southern consciousness, psychedelic, and other independent antiwar voices of the era as never before told. New to this second edition are stories representing the Native American and rank-and-file independent voices.

Forewords from the first edition, by Chicago Seed veteran Abe Peck and attorney William Kunstler, will again be featured along with a new foreword by Markos Moulitsas, founder of dailykos.com, the most important progressive blog site of today’s new media.

With our country in another useless war, this time in two countries, the timing couldn’t be better for publication of these stories. Markos’ foreword connects yesterday’s underground press generation with today’s blogger generation. It’s time to listen again to the poets and visionaries of the independent, alternative press.

The MSU Press is a non-profit university publisher whose mission is to be a catalyst for positive intellectual, social, and technological change through the publication of research and intellectual inquiry, making significant contributions to scholarship in the arts, humanities, sciences, and social sciences. 

More information on the first edition of Voices from the Underground may be found at www.azenphonypress.com.

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