Narcisa: Our Lady of Ashes

AVAILABLE NOW FROM HEARTWORM PRESS
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Narcisa: Our Lady of Ashes is renowned tattoo artist Jonathan Shaw's latest and most shockingly in-your-face leap into the world of outlaw literature. Set in the hot urban sprawl of Rio de Janeiro, Shaw's story follows the twisted love affair between a middle-aged gypsy and the beautifully manipulative and insane young prostitute, Narcisa, with hilarious, poignant and often tragic detail. Recounted in three years of diary entries, Shaw's character navigates the teeming slums and lice-infested flop houses of Rio and stumbles along a secret passage to enlightenment at the hands of a gyrating Buddhist Dakini. Through this darkly hilarious litany of doomed love, drug addiction, compulsive sex and mutual enslavement, Shaw proves that it is possible to follow your heart and never once be degraded by self pity. Inspired by real-life experience, Narcisa is bound to be an underground classic.
"...In Tibetan mythology, the Dakini is a wild goddess of female fury, usually shown wearing a necklace of human skulls, holding a knife in one hand and a cup filled with menstrual blood in the other. If that sounds like your kind of girl, you'll discover a kindred spirit in Cigano, the rough-hewn, motorcycle-riding narrator of Narcisa, Jonathan Shaw's tale of addiction."- Playboy
"Jonathan Shaw is a shameless evildoer, a decorated veteran of the dug war whose deviance is only exceeded by his clever ability to weave his sickness into a true classic of American literature. He is Oscar Wilde and Charlie Manson tattooing his own portrait of Dorian Gray on the white underbelly of a society desperately in need of this type of fearless storytelling."- Marilyn Manson
"Jonathan Shaw is the great nightmare anti-hero of the new age." - Iggy Pop
"Shaw, a legendary tattoo artist, former friend of Charles Manson and current friend of Marilyn Manson, has woven a vicious stack of pages together about a drug addled maniac of a Brazilian Prostitute that is sure to tighten the sack of many a jaded man..." -VICE
“Jonathan Shaw has made it through the eye of the needle into our lives. This kind of rite of passage gives his perspective a sense of the physical wold which he creates for us. To immerse ourselves in this bare-bones attitude is what a novel is supposed to do for a reader. Lucky us.”-Deborah Harry
"If Hubert Selby Jr., Charles Bukowski, Ernest Hemingway, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Neil Cassady, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, the Marquis de Sade, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Joao Gilberto, Edward Teach, Charley Parker, Iggy Pop, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, R. Crumb, Robert Williams, Joe Coleman, Dashiell Hammett, E.M. Cioran and all of the Three Stooges had all been involved in some greasy, shameful, evil whorehouse orgy, Jonathan Shaw would surely be its diabolical, reprobate spawn”. - Johnny Depp
“Jonathan Shaw’s Narcisa- Our Lady of Ashes is one hell of a wild ride through the bizarre netherworld of his own damaged consciousness. His experiences are real and his language and insights kinetic and brutal. This is what the French would call “littérature maudit”, and Shaw’s writing certifies him as a subversive and criminal inhabitant of the world of human expression.”- Jim Jarmusch
"Jonathan Shaw has had his passport stamped in hell so many times he could get his mail there. Vile as junkie-cum, beautiful as a dead drunk’s bible, Narcisa will keep you clawing at the pages, wondering how one man can wreak so much havoc, suffer so much for Art, and still have enough brains left to put a sentence together, let alone the heart to create this unique, riveting, hyper-colorful and –scariest of all — brutally true adventure. Written in blood, Narcisa takes us places most people never come back from. This is gonna hurt, motherfucker, but the author is living proof that whatever doesn’t kill you can get you laid… What are we, in the end, but the sum of our scars?" – Jerry Stahl
"JONATHAN SHAW’S NARCISA HOOKS YOU RIGHT FROM PAGE ONE AND HOLDS YOU IN ITS GRIP LIKE A CHAMPION WRESTLER… WITH ALL THE FAKE-ASS POSERS WRITING BOOKS THESE DAYS, THANK GOD SHAW HAS FINALLY PENNED THIS ONE. IT IS THE REAL DEAL. SUCKERS TAKE NOTCIE… JS HAS SPOKEN." -John "Bloodclot" Joseph