Forced Entries

Book excerpt: The sensational sequel to the bestselling memoir The Basketball Diaries During the early 1970s, Jim Carroll was a young and rising star in the crazy and creative downtown scene in New York City. He worked at the Factory for Andy Warhol and discussed art, literature, and the cosmos with Robert Smithson, Allen Ginsberg, and Bob Dylan. He spent nights at Max’s Kansas City, listening to the Velvet Underground. And he did far too many drugs -- until his survival instinct impelled him to leave New York for a Northern California retreat. Intimate and revealing, the episodes in Forced Entries, Carroll’s diaries from that period, provide a sometimes hilarious, sometimes frightening glimpse of people who tested the limits of life and sanity. "Forced Entries captures the early-seventies period in New York better than anything I’ve read in a long time." -- William S. Burroughs