Gregory Stephenson

Representations of baseball in Jack Kerouac's letters, journals, fiction, poetry & essays. Perspectives on the spiritual dimensions of the sport, drawn from articles and books by scholars in the field.

AND THE RIVERS THEREOF: Following the flow of river imagery through the writings of Jack Kerouac - novels, short stories, journals & essays. Reflections upon the roles and resonances of watercourses in the Kerouacian chronicle.

Notes on Gregory Corso's lost poems & last poems, comments on various of his verse plays, together with an account of a larcenous episode (long-hidden) from the poet's hapless youth. Photos and illustrations.

Akbar del Piombo - illustrious subterranean luminary, mysterious, pseudonymous author of six darkly comic, wildly satirical collage novels, together with half-a-dozen volumes of steamy prose. Akbar del Piombo - preposterous, portentous name, once widely believed to be a nom-de-plume of William S. Burroughs. Akbar del Piombo - the name itself a kind of collage, fittingly inconsonant for a virtuoso of the incongruous. Concealed behind the Akbar del Piombo pen name were the mordant eye and fertile brain of Norman Rubington (1921-1991.) Annotations herein based on a correspondence between Rubington and Gregory Stephenson.

Essays on six neglected books and their forgotten authors. Novels and autobiographies by Barbara O'Brien, George Mandel, Loran Hurnscot, M.K. Joseph, Anna Kavan, Finn MacMahon. Plot summaries and critical analyses.

Discussions and analyses of contemporary Catholic poets, including John Slater, Elizabeth Jennings, Sally Read, John Quenon and others. Books considered: Surpassing Pleasure, Lean, Amounting to Nothing, The Point of Splitting, The Day Hospital, Broken Sleep and Northern Light.

THE RAGGED PROMISED LAND: Jack Kerouac's America and other scenes.Travels in a holey holy land, sojourns in a skid row hotel, larceny & poetic license, a secret Victorian stoner, raptures of an impoverished consumptive young poet, the strange resurrection of old engravings, a gathering of far-flung fragments, moving a ton of weed. Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Akbar del Piombo, Samuel Greenberg, Jerry Kamstra and someone else.

Data toward a deep map of the city of Tempe, Arizona: Oneiric topographies, telluric currents, zones, ambiances, valences, variable resonances, covert contours, nocturnal alluvium, residual traces, temporal strata, magnetic fields, subliminal alignments, geobiographical configurations, vortices of obsessional fascination.

This title offers an enlightening journey through the best of Beat literature. In these critical essays Gregory Stephenson takes the reader on a journey through the literature of the Beat Generation: a journey encompassing that common ethos of Beat literature - the passage from darkness to light, from fragmented being toward wholeness, from Beat to Beatific. He travels through Jack Kerouac's ""Duluoz Legend"", following Kerouac's quests for identity, community, and spiritual knowledge. He examines Allen Ginsberg's use of transcendence in ""Howl"", discovers the Gnostic vision in William S. Burroughs' fiction, and studies the mythic, visionary power of Lawrence Ferlinghetti's poetry. Stephenson also provides detailed examinations of the writing of lesser-known Beat authors: John Clellon Holmes, Gregory Corso, Richard Farina, and Michael McClure. He explores the myth and the mystery of the literary legend of Neal Cassady. The book concludes with a look at the common traits of the Beat writers - their use of primitivism, shamanism, myth and magic, spontaneity, and improvisation, all of which led them to a new idiom of consciousness and to the expansion of the parameters of American literature.

A strong case for Stone as an articulate and passionate moralist; In this guide to the fiction of Robert Stone, Gregory Stephenson introduces readers to a novelist of popular appeal and critical acclaim whom he describes as an anomaly among contemporary American writers - an author independent of literary fashions, unaffiliated with groups or movements. In this critical survey, Stephenson identifies the qualities that separate Stone from his peers and have brought him accolades such as the National Book Award, earning him a place of enduring significance in the American canon. Stephenson provides close readings of Stone's novels and short stories, including A Hall of Mirrors, Dog Soldiers, A Flag for Sunrise, Children of Light, Outerbridge Reach, and Damascus Gate. He traces the combination of a stark, hard-boiled realism with the hallucinatory and mystical aspects of Stone's writing. His examination of Stone's attention to character, imagery, and figures of speech stands beside his suggestion that Stone's corpus reveals a coherent, evolving vision of moral, psychological, political, and metaphysical concerns.