The Genius of 10th St.

Genius of 10th Street is a searching, riotously alive memoir-in-fragments—an exploration of identity, memory, art, politics, friendship, and the strange afterlives our names and words take on once they leave our hands.

With wry humor and piercing tenderness, Robert Roth travels through the overlapping worlds he has inhabited for eight decades: the downtown literary and art scenes, radical political movements, queer countercultures, the Peru of his closest collaborators, the intimate circles of poets, editors, musicians, and visionaries who shaped and occasionally confounded him.

Haunted by the multiple "Robert Roths" with whom he shares a name—and sometimes a mistaken reputation—he reflects on how legacies are formed, distorted, misunderstood, and sometimes hilariously invented. Along the way he introduces unforgettable figures: his revolutionary uncle, his brilliant and troubled friends, the mentors and lovers and accidental acquaintances who altered the course of his life, and the artists whose work he midwifed, defended, or questioned.

Part memoir, part cultural archaeology, part philosophical conversation with the future, Genius of 10th Street is ultimately a celebration of the messy, beautiful, improvisational networks of connection that make a life. It is a book about writing and being written about, about the terror of aging and the shock of survival, and about how friendship, creativity, and fierce attention can revitalize a world—even as the world keeps shifting under our feet.