"My writing is a teaching," Kerouac noted in his journal, and this was the point, even if readers didn't get it at first. "One of the greatest incentives of the writer is the long business of getting his teachings out and accepted." He was twenty-six when he started On the Road, shaking off a brief failed marriage and the dath of his father, embarking on a new life. The new book would teach the way. To prepare he wrote down eleven "true thoughts" about himself, many of them vanities he hoped to overcome along his characters' travels. "I'm ready to grow up if they'll let me," he wrote. The product of his labors, he was sure, would be a "powerful and singularly gloomy book...but good." In due course the narrator learns and dispenses many lessons, often in the form of parables and revelations, providing a guide to alternative adulthood: What would Jack do? Contrary to its rebel rep, On the Road is not about being Peter Pan; it is about becoming an adult. - from Why Kerouac Matters Submit a Review
$ 23.95
"Kesey does it. His head still raids the clouds . . . Quizzing the cosmos." - James Wolcott, Vanity Fair
Can you imagine why a pornographer would be shy? Are you satisfied with the state of (a) World Society (b) your soul (c) American writing? Are you in the habit of reading books that could have been written by anybody? Do you really want the truth? Do you know how angels learn to fly? What would you feed a green deer? Do you think a profound social message can be conveyed by a book that is comic in character? When Kenneth Patchen's comic masterpiece, The Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer first appeared in 1945, these questions were asked on the dust jacket. They have never seemed more relevant. The hilarious saga of Alfred Budd of Bivalve, New Jersey a Candide like innocent and part time pornographer, written with what Diane DiPrima called Patchen's "tender silliness," should inspire a new generation of readers Submit a Review
$ 14
Foreward by Allen Ginsberg, Edited by Anne Waldman Submit a Review
$ 16.95
Amiri Baraka -dramatist, poet, essayist, orator, and fiction writer - is perhaps the preeminent African-American literary figure of our time. Yet, until now, it has been im possible to find the full range of his work represented in one volume. Submit a Review
$ 19.95
"This is the book you will want to read and reread. It will tell you what is happening in present time. How things are made to happen or not to happen, in present time. Start to read it and you will find that it reads itself." William S. Burroughs Submit a Review
"It is a sad book and uproarious, naïve and knowledgeable, insane and finally as straight as the top of Amram's piano. It is one man's struggle for the kind of authenticity in live and in music which everything in our time seems designed to frustrate and destroy." - Arthut Miller Submit a Review
$ 15.95
"CBGB's is packed with shaved wolves in black leather jackets squeezed up against wimpier fashion victims. The star defender is Dito - a tough, sensitive boxer from Astoria, Queens. He howls A Guide to Recognizing You Saints at a moon that is inside all of us." Brad Gooch, author of The Golden Age of Promiscuity Submit a Review
