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New York City has always been a larger-than-life, half-mythical place, and this collection offers an appropriately stunning mosaic of its many incarnations in poetry–ranging from Walt Whitman's exuberant celebrations to contemporary poets' moving responses to the September 11th attack on the city. All the icons of this greatest of cities swirl and flash through these pages: taxis and subways, bridges and skyscrapers, ghettos and roof gardens and fire escapes, from the South Bronx to ... Read more
How can intense religious beliefs coexist with pluralism in America today? Examining the role of the religious imagination in contemporary religious practice and in some of the best-known works of American literature from the past fifty years, Postmodern Belief shows how belief for its own sake--a belief absent of doctrine--has become an answer to pluralism in a secular age. Amy Hungerford reveals how imaginative literature and religious practices together allow novelists, poets, and critics to ... Read more
At the heart of Jack Kerouac's hidden life is the conflict between his "homoerotically inclined life and the blustering masculinity" he felt compelled to demonstrate. As a youth in Lowell, Massachusetts, Kerouac was a football hero, brash and rowdy, pursued by the local coeds. But his strongest emotions focused on an artistic high school friend, Sammy Sampas, whose physical advances Jack ultimately rejected and forever mourned. This failure to resolve his emotional and sexual ... Read more
Love, literature, and friendship at the heart of the Beat Generation Off the Road tells the intimate story of the now legendary Neal Cassady and his remarkable friendship with Jack Kerouac (who immortalized Cassady as Dean Moriarty in On the Road) and Allen Ginsberg. Written by the woman who loved them all--as wife of Cassady, lover of Kerouac, and friend of Ginsberg---this riveting memoir spans one of the most vital eras in twentieth-century literature and culture, including the explosive ... Read more
Birth of a Psychedelic Culture, an extraordinary new book, shines a bright light on the emergence of the sixties culture and the experiments with mind-altering substances undertaken by Professors Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert (Ram Dass) and then-Harvard graduate student Ralph Metzner. Based on a series of con-versations between Metzner and Ram Dass and recorded by psychiatrist and author Gary Bravo, this book describes their initial experiments at Harvard, the experiments after they were ... Read more
Beloved by both Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady, Lu Anne Henderson’s story has never been told.Lu Anne was a beautiful 15-year-old girl in Denver in 1945 when she met Neal, a fast-talking hurricane of male sexuality and vast promises. The two married, and soon they were hanging out with a group of would-be writers, including Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. But Neal and Jack initially didn’t like each other very much. Lu Anne taught them how to love each other ? in effect, making the Beat ... Read more
"This is a guide for instructing posthumans in living a Dada life. It is not advisable, nor was it ever, to lead a Dada life."--The Posthuman Dada GuideThe Posthuman Dada Guide is an impractical handbook for practical living in our posthuman world--all by way of examining the imagined 1916 chess game between Tristan Tzara, the daddy of Dada, and V. I. Lenin, the daddy of communism. This epic game at Zurich's Café de la Terrasse--a battle between radical visions of art and ideological ... Read more
W. H. Auden's emigration from England to the United States in 1939 marked more than a turning point in his own life and work--it changed the course of American poetry itself. The Age of Auden takes, for the first time, the full measure of Auden's influence on American poetry. Combining a broad survey of Auden's midcentury U.S. cultural presence with an account of his dramatic impact on a wide range of younger American poets--from Allen Ginsberg to Sylvia Plath--the book offers a ... Read more
"The narrative of the founding and embattled maintenance of The Living Theatre is a ripping American epic...an important book that will serve as a reference for years to come" (American Theatre Magazine) Throughout the 1950s and 1960s the Living Theatre was the most radical group in American theatrical history. Their flamboyant and counter-cultural experiments attracted international attention, their performances were leftist and sexually explicit. They suffered repeated censorship, arrests and ... Read more
Focusing on lyric poetry, Mastery's End looks at important, yet neglected, issues of subjectivity in post-World War II travel literature. Jeffrey Gray departs from related studies in two regards: nearly all recent scholarly books on the literature of travel have dealt with pre-twentieth-century periods, and all are concerned with narrative genres. Gray questions whether the postcolonial theoretical model of travel as mastery, hegemony, and exploitation still applies. In its place he ... Read more
After 9/11, postmodernism and irony were declared dead. Charles Bernstein here proves them alive and well in poems elegiac, defiant, and resilient to the point of approaching song. Heir to the democratic and poetic sensibilities of Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg, Bernstein has always crafted verse that responds to its historical moment, but no previous collection of his poems so specifically addresses the events of its time as Girly Man, which features works written on the evening of September ... Read more
The first book to bring together the key texts of modern BuddhismIn the last hundred years, the world, especially the West, has increasingly embraced the teachings of Buddhism. A Modern Buddhist Bible is the first anthology to bring together the writings from Buddhists, both Eastern and Western, that have redefined Buddhism for our era. Forging a universal doctrine from the divergent traditions of China, Sri Lanka, Japan, Burma, Thailand, and Tibet, the makers of modern Buddhism saw it as a ... Read more
The I Ching originated in China as a divination manual more than three thousand years ago. In 136 BCE the emperor declared it a Confucian classic, and in the centuries that followed, this work had a profound influence on the philosophy, religion, art, literature, politics, science, technology, and medicine of various cultures throughout East Asia. Jesuit missionaries brought knowledge of the I Ching to Europe in the seventeenth century, and the American counterculture embraced it in the 1960s. ... Read more
“Guitar Army was our manual for revolt. It’s a rainbow-colored Howl, still resonating today with the singular value of idealism.”—Michael Simmons John Sinclair, manager of the notorious Detroit band MC5 and leader of the leftist revolutionary vanguard White Panther Party, is the still-charging embodiment of a dazzlingly optimistic time in which change felt necessary and possible. Sinclair was the martyr of the original war on drugs, sentenced to ten years in prison for possession of two ... Read more
Acclaimed national security columnist and noted cultural critic Fred Kaplan looks past the 1960s to the year that really changed America While conventional accounts focus on the sixties as the era of pivotal change that swept the nation, Fred Kaplan argues that it was 1959 that ushered in the wave of tremendous cultural, political, and scientific shifts that would play out in the decades that followed. Pop culture exploded in upheaval with the rise of artists like Jasper Johns, Norman ... Read more
This incredible three-CD set drawn from the archives of the BBC captures the voices of poets from the twentieth century, one of the most prolific and significant periods in American letters. Capturing the enormous energy and variety in American poetry at this time, the compilation includes recordings of Robert Frost, E. E. Cummings, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Robinson Jeffers, Langston Hughes,Wallace Stevens, Conrad Aiken, Archibald MacLeish, Ogden Nash, Theodore Roethke, John ... Read more
Barry Miles, noted for Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now, also wrote biographies of Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. This hatchet job on Kerouac lacks what makes his McCartney book great--total access to his subject--and it won't replace the more eloquent bios Kerouac and Memory Babe. But it is enriched by Miles's interviews with those in a position to debunk the legend. Was Kerouac a sweet saint, as his burgeoning congregation believes? "He cared more for his cat than ... Read more
Patti Smith, pioneering punk diva, has always worshipped at the altar of the word, and she opens this book with a quote from her mentor and friend, the late Allen Ginsberg: "The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is holy the hearers are holy the ecstasy is holy." If that is true, then this volume serves as Smith's Book of Common Prayer, containing all the lyrics from her past seven albums, and spanning two and a half decades. She picks out both salient and arcane ... Read more
From the author of Mystery Train and Lipstick Traces, an exhilarating and provocative investigation of the tangle of American identity “America is a place and a story, made up of exuberance and suspicion, crime and liberation, lynch mobs and escapes; its greatest testaments are made of portents and warnings, biblical allusions that lose all certainty in the American air.” It is this story of self-invention and nationhood that Greil Marcus rediscovers, beginning with John Winthrop’s invocation ... Read more
This tightly written and convincing study by a British freelance journalist and college lecturer explores the relationship between the wily William S. Burroughs's writing and his homosexuality. In his excellent introduction, Jamie Russell describes the state of Burroughs studies, and the tendency of most critics to follow Norman Mailer in regarding "the fact that he's gay" as "incidental." The drug use and misogyny in Burroughs's novels has received far more attention than the ... Read more
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