In 1964, when Ken Kesey, author and LSD evangelist, and a group of friends calling themselves the Merry Pranksters, set off across the US in a bus daubed in psychedelic colours, they talked of being either on the bus or off the bus. It was a phrase both literal and metaphorical. Not simply, were you there, physically but were you there mystically?Tom Wolfe was not, in any sense, on the bus. He claims to have never even taken LSD. Yet in 1968 Wolfe wrote the definitive account of that journey and its aftermath, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, that would become one of the key texts of the psychedelic revolution that swept across the US in the late 1960s. The book is now being republished in abridged form by Taschen in a deluxe edition, featuring extraordinary pictures by the photographers Larry Schiller and Ted Streshinsky, who chronicled Kesey and the California LSD scene in its infancy.In 1958, Kesey participated in a programme (covertly funded by the CIA) to test the effects of LSD. Soon, he was experimenting at home with his friends.In 1964 Kesey purchased an antiquated school bus and with 13 friends set out for New York. A rolling, carnivalesque advertisement for the coming psychedelic revolution, it would become the most famous bus journey in US history. Returning to his home in California, Kesey threw a series of drug-fuelled parties known as "acid tests", with the Grateful Dead as the house band.In 1966 Wolfe spent a year interviewing the Pranksters and immersing himself in the hundreds of hours of film and audio recordings made by them on the bus journey. But he made no attempt to fit in - forever the observer, in his trademark three-piece tailored suits and silk ties.The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is a defining example of New Journalism - reportage employing all of the devices of fiction. The book is threaded with vivid, stream-of-consciousness descriptions of acid trips that suggest Wolfe had somehow climbed inside the head of the person experiencing it. BOOK BITES: R45,000 - the prize money awarded to recipients of this year's Arts and Culture Trust Awards last week. Lifetime achievement awards were bestowed on Mongane Wally Serote for literature, Pieter-Dirk Uys for theatre, Johnny Clegg for music, Penny Siopis for visual art, Albie Sachs for arts advocacy and Johaar Mosaval for dance.The Erotic Review - tired of all the laughter at the annual bad sex in fiction awards, the Review is in protest introducing a prize for good sex in fiction. The Review's publisher, Lisa Moylett, told The Times UK: ''We are throwing down the gauntlet. No more 'bad sex' writing. That is not something we should be celebrating."The Book Lounge - where Rustum Kozain will be in conversation with Karen Jennings at the launch of Jennings's book Travels With My Father on Thursday at 6.30pm. - Tymon Smith..