Ru Marshall discusses his new book "American Trickster" with Alison Owings

This event is FREE to attend. Seating is first come, first served. (RSVPs are optional, but encouraged for our planning purposes.)

Meet the author, find out about a terrific new book, ask questions, hear directly from the author, and get personalized signed books!

Bookshop West Portal will be hosting author and artist Ru Marshall to celebrate their new book, American Trickster: The Hidden Lives of Carlos Castaneda. Join us to get a spooky look into the legacy of one of 20th-century California's most notorious and mysterious figures. Marshall will be joined in conversation with Alison Owings, local journalist and author of Mayor of the Tenderloin.

You don't need to have read the book beforehand to enjoy the event, but we do recommend reserving your copy ahead of time:

About the Book:

"A project of epic proportions, pulled off with remarkable élan."
--Kirkus Reviews

A gripping exposé of deception, cult power, and the long shadow of Carlos Castaneda, the man behind the biggest literary hoax of the twentieth century.

Twenty years in the making, American Trickster: The Hidden Lives of Carlos Castaneda unravels the story of the secretive faux-anthropologist who pulled off one of the greatest literary hoaxes in modern history. Both an investigation of the techniques employed by charismatic narcissists and a study of the cult dynamics that still shape American life, American Trickster defies conventional biography. It emerges as a chilling allegory for the Trump era, a trenchant critique of academia's complicity in distorting and erasing Indigenous culture, and a deep dive into the mechanics of New Age spiritual abuse.

Carlos Castaneda, born in Peru in 1925, fled to the U.S. in 1951, escaping responsibility for a child he fathered with a thirteen-year-old girl. He changed his name repeatedly, worked as a taxi driver, studied creative writing, and eventually enrolled in anthropology at UCLA in 1959. In 1968, the University of California Press published his first book, The Teachings of Don Juan, which described his supposed encounters with a Yaqui shaman who initiated him into a secret world of peyote-fueled visions and ancient knowledge never before shared with a "Westerner."

Castaneda was quickly hailed as a revolutionary figure. Admirers ranged from John Lennon and Joni Mitchell to Federico Fellini, George Lucas, and Octavio Paz. His books became international bestsellers and remain the most popular titles ever published on Native American spirituality--despite having little to no connection to actual Indigenous practices.

For a time, his truth went unchallenged. Then, in 1973, Time magazine published a searing exposé revealing that Castaneda wasn't who he claimed to be. As his academic credibility unraveled, he turned inward, building a secretive spiritual group that blurred the line between fiction and reality. Castaneda's followers, mostly women, became living extensions of the characters in his books--devoted disciples who often abandoned their former lives entirely.

By the 1990s, as book sales declined, the group emerged publicly, offering workshops and seminars to thousands across the globe. When Castaneda was diagnosed with liver cancer, he told his disciples he would not die, but burn from within and ascend to another realm--and invited them to join him. After his death in 1998, five of his closest female followers vanished. They are widely believed to have taken their own lives.

About the Author:

Ru Marshall is a nonbinary writer and visual artist. Twenty years in the making, American Trickster, their biography of Carlos Castaneda, will be published by OR Books in June 2026. Their novel, A Separate Reality, was released by Carrol and Graf in 2006 and was nominated for a Lambda Award for Debut Fiction. They are the recipient of the Hazel Rowley Prize from the Biographers International Organization, and have twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Their work has appeared in Salon, N + 1, The Evergreen Review, The Kenyon Review, The Barcelona Review and elsewhere. Their visual work has been exhibited at numerous venues in the United States and Europe. Rmarshallstudio.com

About the Conversation Partner:

Alison Owings is a journalist/oral historian/editor who wrote for such CBS luminaries as Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather before deciding to write her own books, based on oral histories she collected from interviews with overlooked and/or stereotyped groups, from German Women of the Third Reich to American waitresses to Native Americans, to most recently, a formerly homeless man in San Francisco. That book, The Mayor of the Tenderloin, she presented at Bookshop West Portal last fall. She is considering interviewing members of ICE… but hasn’t been able to locate any by name.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

BookShop West Portal, 80 West Portal Avenue, San Francisco, United States

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