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Jonathan Shaw is a world traveling outlaw artist, novelist, blogger, head doctor, anti-folk hero and whorehouse philosopher. A legendary tattoo master and notorious creator of trendsetting underground art, over the decades Shaw’s work has quietly infiltrated and swayed the very direction of our popular culture. From ‘Reality’ based television programs, to fashion styles of the rich and famous his original, innovative mark is clearly visible everywhere you look.
A child of the 50’s, Jonathan grew up the bastard spawn of a brief, violent and unhappy marriage between big band legend, Artie Shaw and the beautiful alcoholic movie star Doris Dowling. Shaw’s own surreal world view was shaped during the era of the Vietnam war, largely by massive preteen LSD consumption and his close personal interactions with some of the great minds of his time.
After running with the likes of Frank Zappa, Jim Morrison, the Manson Family and Charles Bukowski, he eventually fell prey to heroin addiction and was swept away in a degenerate wave of crime and moral degradation. Around the age of 20, fleeing for his life, he left 1970’s Hollywood behind to travel the world by thumb and tramp freighter. He is still out there somewhere.
Clean and sober now, Jonathan was recently referred to by Marilyn Manson as “a decorated veteran of the drug war.” Today he resides mostly in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil. He has one son, also an artist, friends, lovers, admirers, well-wishers and partners in crime all over the world. Many years retired from the burgeoning tattoo industry he once set the very standards for, he continues to test the limits of his reality, traveling the South American backlands by motorcycle, interacting with teenage crack whores, witch doctors,
artists and outlaws, while continuing to terrify and inspire with his nightmarish poetry, memoirs, screenplays and fiction.
NARCISA: OUR LADY OF ASHES available now!
Jonathan Shaw’s award-winning new novel, Narcisa: Our Lady of Ashes is the renowned tattoo artist and underground journalist’s latest and most shocking in- your-face, head-first plunge into the sewers of outlaw literature.
Set in the hot urban sprawl of Rio de Janeiro, Shaw’s breathlessly authentic, page-turning tale of love and terror follows the twisted saga of a middle-aged gypsy ex-con and the love of his life, the beautifully manipulative and insane paranormal teenage crack whore, Narcisa. Their adventures are recounted with hilarious, poignant and tragic detail.
Penned in an eerily voyeuristic style over three years of frantic diary entries, Shaw’s unforgettable characters navigate the teeming slums and lice-infested flophouses of Rio. Their adrenaline charged adventures prod the reader at gunpoint through a hair-raising gauntlet of demonic entities and near death experiences, while seeking safe passage to enlightenment at the hands of a bloodthirsty Goddess of the Apocalypse.
Throughout this darkly hilarious and brutally intelligent litany of doomed love, drug addiction, compulsive sex, mutual enslavement and the afflicted soul’s quest for salvation, Shaw proves that it is more noble to follow one’s heart into the darkest regions of hell than to live for one moment in self pity or regret.
Inspired by real-life events, Narcisa became an overnight cult classic.
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