Review by
GonzoFest New York 2026: The Official Event Book
$TK, 249 pages Kent Fielding, Chris Dean, and Margaret Harrell, eds.
Gonzofest 2026 Program Book. It’s weird. Not posing at all: It’s Gonzo. In our much-lied-to nation, Gonzo smacks folks awake enough to make us listen and, with luck, to stand up and resist with all the weirdness we can muster.
Resist what? The 250-page GF Guide answers that with resistance poetry, and other work, inspired by late Gonzo-journalist Hunter S. Thompson. Claire Conroy, in “Resurrect Gonzo,” summarizes America’s predicament simply: “We need to be heard and not herded …”
This publication is a gasoline on counter-culture flames Thompson stoked with the opening line of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.”
I didn’t drive to Barstow because of that line, but that line was the only thing I knew about Barstow before I got there.
Like HST’s work, GF Guide writers spot big vaporous holes in our culture and drive batwinged cars through them, fast, fingers flipped off at the biggest American liars and their biggest and dumbest and cruelest ideas. It’s not just laughing at the powerfully corrupt, but it’s making them mad. It’s scaring them by not quailing at their wrath.
The GF Guide includes an interview with HST friend Ron Whitehead about how he regularly smuggled whiskey into HST’s mom’s old folks’ home. There’s a section dedicated to Curtis Robinson, a “one of the last great newspapermen” who died this year. Robinson was an HST pal and part of a drinking scene that drew celebrities to HST’s Aspen, Colorado, kitchen in the 1990s.
GF Guide editors include a recipe for “Hunters S. Thompson’s Midnight Chili” that’s hot enough to light your face on fire. Like I said, weird.
The GF Guide is a prelude and schedule of a four-day, four-night mid-July New York City gathering of poets, musicians, and HST enthusiasts, some of whom have been meeting for two-and-a-half decades.
Included are a couple of literary treasures, like old faxes written by HST, and biographical information on his artistic collaborator Ralph Steadman. Journalists can geek out on a timeline of HST’s core gig: sportswriting. “Fear and Loathing” includes an as it was Sport’s Illustrated assignment that landed him in a Las Vegas motorcycle race. Imagine, a writer could once find a gig in Puerto Rico writing for a bowling magazine.
Also notable is a true crime piece that argues that HST’s juvenile delinquency in 1950s Louisville, Ky., included a stint as leader to a pack of vandals. Police eyed Hunter as a suspect, in part, because of the good spelling in the graffiti. Writes David S. Wills in “The Wrecker: HST’s Teenage Crime Spree: “… they were confident that the culprit was ‘an educated person.’”
Weird! As I write this review, I am seated outside of Dawn’s good vibe Blue Lantern coffee shop on Main Street, Lewiston, Idaho. A four-door dented compact car painted oxidized blue, rolls by and a stranger, who presents as a mangy pile of dark hair behind the steering wheel, eyeball’s me and starts barking. Loud and mean, junkyard style, barking.
I don’t like it. Not a bit. But yeah, that’s Gonzo too. So, kiss my ass, Barking Man; and keep up the weird work. Truth be told, it’s karma. I’ll tell you a story someday about how a man complained about me my passengers, a few dusty whitewater rafting guides, for barking at his wife as I drove slowly through hot-summer Moab, Utah, with the theme from Top Gun pumping from speakers of the dual cab company truck. To be fair, we were barking at everyone.
Essays, anecdotes, and time travel with HST’s friends through their memories of a true American original are great, but it’s the poets who highlight this GF Guide.
Poets matter most during times like now: our leaders of industry, politics, and religion and the local fraternal orders of whatever are lying to us while everything burns. ICE agents are killing us, brazenly, lawlessly, and hidden behind government-sanctioned masks. Our president says it’s for our safety. The lies are as great as our problems.
So, it’s no wonder that poet Ryan Masters hasn’t bothered to pack a go-bag to escape inevitable flames coming with California’s new firestorm season. When everything is on fire, just where do you think you’re going to take that go bag?
It’s dark. But naming it matters. Listening and resisting matters. Still, doom and gloom is where hope shines brightest.
In “To a Life in Despair,” poet Joseph Fasano, says: “I promise, I stone-cold promise, that the face of utter hopelessness is the face of something just about to change.”
Para on fest day, dates, headliners, including Fest URL
Reviewer BIO TK