Jonathan Shaw is a world traveling outlaw artist, novelist, blogger, head doctor, anti-folk hero, whorehouse philosopher, legendary tattoo master and notorious innovator and creator of underground art– the bastard product of a brief, surreal, violent and unhappy alcoholic marriage between big band legend Artie Shaw and movie star Doris Dowling, the Vietnam War and massive preteen LSD consumption. After running with the likes of Jim Morrison, the Manson Family and Charles Bukowski, he fell prey to heroin addiction and a life of crime. He finally left 1970’s Hollywood to travel the world by thumb and tramp freighter and is still out there somewhere.
Jonathan mostly resides in Rio De Janeiro where he has one son and numerous wives, lovers and friends. He continues to test the limits of his reality, traveling the South American backlands by motorcycle, dating teenage crack whores and writing nightmarish poetry, memoirs and fiction.
NARCISA: OUR LADY OF ASHES available July 1st!
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. CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE.
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