Oneonta: The Novel Has Been Published and is Available for Purchase

ONEONTA, N.Y. - Oct. 6, 2014 - PRLog -- The long-awaited novel written by the late Julian Koosman titled Oneonta: The Novel has been published and is now available for sale at Amazon.com and other online retailers. Mr. Koosman, who passed away in 2013 off the coast of Bora Bora, was a lifelong writer and adventurer. The novel is loosely based on his experiences attending Oneonta State College in Upstate New York in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a time when his alma mater was considered one of the premier party schools in the world.

"He often credited the experiences he had with his mates in this place as the launching point of what would become an extraordinary life that ended far too soon—although Jules may not have seen it that way, having packed so much into his forty years," writes Edward Chidlington III, who edited the manuscript. Mr. Chidlington was Mr. Koosman's editor when the two worked at Burtlesbush, a trade publisher based in the UK, in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

According to Mr. Chidlington, Mr. Koosman did not consider the novel a finished work, although a review of the text seemed to indicate otherwise except for some editorial corrections. The story revolves around the narrator Hank Gardner, a youth desperate to escape his existence on Long Island to experience all that the world had to offer, with the legendary Oneonta State College as his first stop. It is there that young Gardner gets lost in the excesses of drugs and alcohol, lust and love, and the ultimate quest to find what he is looking for that nearly does him in—the latter being a dilemma that Mr. Chidlington indicates may have been a contributing factor in Mr. Koosman's death twenty five years later.

The Koosman family issued the following statement regarding the publication of this work:

"Our loss of Julian was tragic and eternal, and we ask that our privacy be respected and that no one contact us regarding the publication of this work. We understand that Julian lived his life to the fullest and that he wanted to experience everything that life had to offer, which sometimes left a quite a mess in his wake, of which this book is perhaps a prime example. But we know how much he loved Oneonta State College and the city of Oneonta, and we know how hard he worked on this novel trying to get it right."

For additional information regarding Oneonta: The Novel, visit www.oneontathenovel.com