An evening dedicated to Ken Kesey's novel “Sailor Song” and translator Milena Adam's travelogue about Alaska.

After achieving worldwide success with One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (first published in German in 1972), Kesey founded a commune near San Francisco. They called themselves the Merry Pranksters. With an old school bus, which they painted colorfully and christened Furthur, they toured across America.



At the so-called acid tests, Ken Kesey invited the public to experience for themselves the mind-expanding—and accordingly celebrated as pioneering—effects of LSD. Accompanied by music and colors, they wanted to explore new forms of perception. The tour became legendary, immortalized in Tom Wolfe's book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. In the 1990s, Kesey finally retired to his farm in Eugene, Oregon. There he worked on his last novel, Sailor Song. He died in November 2001.


Milena Adam was born in Hamburg in 1991. She lives and works in Berlin as an editor, translator, and interpreter from French and English.