Death Trip: A Post-Holocaust Psychedelic Memoir
by Seth Lorinczi

Joining us from Portland, OR, author Seth Lorinczi brings his new book Death Trip: A Post-Holocaust Psychedelic Memoir.

A marriage story, a search for meaning in the wake of the Holocaust, and a struggle to release the weight of ancestral trauma, Death Trip is also funny, relatable, and in author Leni Zumas’ words: “As gripping and propulsive as a crime novel.” 

The book takes readers from the ayahuasca basements of Portland's psychedelic therapy underground to the streets and alleyways of Budapest during the darkest days of World War II. By turns wrenching and hilarious, it asks "can trauma be inherited" and, if so, "can psychedelics help us heal?"

Advance Praise for Death Trip

“Death Trip has the potential to open big conversations about ancestral histories—what we carry, as a family or an identified ‘people’—along with all the things we don’t know. In this moment of what Joanna Macy called ‘The Great Turning,’ the courage to view stories with nuance and compassion, to take them in and let them go, is essential to our survival. We're going to have to repair history if we want a future.”
—Vanessa Veselka, Zazen, The Great Offshore Grounds

“In this deeply researched, beautifully written, and passionately lived memoir of intergenerational trauma, Lorinczi leads the reader on a double journey: Into the harrowing bloodlands of 20th-century fascism and, almost as scary, the miasmic inner life of 21st-century, post-punk manhood. This is a good trip in the most profound sense.”
—Jon Raymond, Denial, Freebird

“Seth Lorinczi’s journey through MDMA therapy takes him into a labyrinth of family secrets and ancestral trauma. The story of what he finds there—and how it changes him—is as gripping and propulsive as a crime novel. I was captivated the whole way through.”
—Leni Zumas, Red Clocks

As a memoirist and culture writer, Seth Lorinczi brings a sly humor and a probing eye to the topics of psychedelics, ancestral and intergenerational trauma, and popular culture.

Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and raised in Washington, D.C., Lorinczi was part of the punk scene centered around Dischord Records in the ‘80s and ‘90s. After touring internationally with Modest Mouse, Corin Tucker of Sleater-Kinney and other artists, he turned towards writing as a creative pursuit.

Now based in Portland, Oregon, Lorinczi’s writing appears in The Guardian, DoubleBlind, Narratively, Portland Monthly, and other periodicals and print anthologies. Death Trip: A Post-Holocaust Psychedelic Memoir is his first book.