Jack Kerouac

A timeless travelogue from the leading light of the Beat Generation, Jack Kerouac's Lonesome Traveller is a jubilant celebration of human discovery, published in Penguin Modern Classics.As he roams the US, Mexico, Morocco, Paris and London, Kerouac records, in prose of pure poetry, life on the road. Standing on the engine of a train as it rushes past fields of prickly cactus; witnessing his first bullfight in Mexico while high on opium; catching up with the beat nightlife in New York; burying himself in the snow-capped mountains of north-west America; meditating on a sunlit roof in Tangiers; or falling in love with Montmartre and the huge white basilica of Sacré-Coeur - Kerouac reveals both the endless diversity of human life and his own high-spirited philosophy of self-fulfilment.'Piquant writing, the best part of its flavour being ... the hunt for the big experience, a touch of Hemingway and Whitman'Guardian'Full of startling and beautiful things ... one sees, hears and feels'Sunday Times

'It is the sum of myself, as far as the written word can go' Kerouac on THE TOWN AND THE CITY Kerouac's debut novel is a great coming of age story which can be read as the essential prelude to his later classics. Inspired by grief over his father's death and gripped by determination to write the Great American Novel, he draws largely on his own New England childhood.

Written during a critical period of his life, this volume details the spiritual underpinnings of Jack Kerouac's work--"not only his] most intimate effort, but among his most vibrant, recording the pattern of his thoughts in a way that . . . brings them powerfully, inconvertibly to life (Newsday). "Kerouac's work represents the most extensive experiment in language and literary form undertaken by an American writer of his generation."--The New York Times Book ReviewWhile his masterpiece On the Road languished on the desks of unresponsive editors, Kerouac turned to Buddhism, and in 1953 began writing reading notes on the subject intended for his friend Allen Ginsberg. As his Buddhist study and meditation practice intensified, what had begun as notes evolved into a vast, all-encompassing work of nonfiction into which he poured his life, incorporating poems, haiku, prayers, journal entries, fragments of letters, ideas about writing, sketches, and more. The final manuscript, completed in 1956, was as visually complex as the writing: each page was unique, typed in patterns and interlocking shapes. The elaborate form that Kerouac so painstakingly gave his books is recreated in this typeset facsimile. Passionate, playful, ecstatic, filled with humor, insight, beautiful language, sorrow, and struggle, Some of the Dharma is a far-ranging and extremely revealing work.

In his prolific correspondence Jack Kerouac set down the raw material of the life that he would later transmute into his multi-volume "Legend of Duluoz". He also refined the seemingly freewheeling and spontaneous prose style that became his trademark. This volume contains many letters written between 1940, when Kerouac was a college freshman and 1956, immediately before his leap to celebrity status. They offer invaluable insights into Kerouac's family life, friendships, travels, love affairs and literary apprenticeship, and provide accounts of the events that inspired "On the Road", "Visions of Cody" and "The Dharma Burns".

Eight extended poems from the acclaimed author of On the Road and Big Sur--featuring an introduction by Robert Creeley Best known for his "Legend of Duluoz" novels, Jack Kerouac is also an important poet. In the eight poems collected in Book of Blues, Kerouac writes from the heart of experience in the music of language, employing the same instrumental blues form that he used to fullest effect in Mexico City Blues, his largely unheralded classic of postmodern literature. "In my system, the form of blues choruses is limited by the small page of the breastpocket notebook in which they are written, like the form of a set number of bars in a jazz blues chorus, and so sometimes the word-meaning can carry from one chorus into another, or not, just like the phrase-meaning can carry harmonically from one chorus to another, or not, in jazz, so that, in these blues as in jazz, the form is determined by time, and by the musician's spontaneous phrasing & harmonizing with the beat of time as if waves & waves on by in measured choruses."--Jack Kerouac These poems include: - San Francisco Blues- Richmond Hill Blues- Bowery Blues- MacDougal Street Blues- Desolation Blues- Orizaba 210 Blues- Orlanda Blues- Cerrada Medellin Blues Edited by Kerouac himself, Book of Blues is an exuberant foray into language and consciousness, rich with imagery, propelled by rhythm, and based in a reverent attentiveness to the moment.

Written from the vantage point of the psychedelic sixties, this fascinating, "loud-mouthed novel" (The Guardian) paints a portrait of young Kerouac, dedicated and disciplined in his determination to be an important American writer. "The capstone of one of the most extraordinary, influential, maddening, and ultimately prodigious achievements in recent literature."--John Clellan Holmes Originally subtitled "An Adventurous Education, 1935-1946," this is a key volume in Jack Kerouac's lifework, the series of autobiographical novels he referred to as The Legend of Duluoz. With the same tender humor and intoxicating wordplay he brought to his masterpieces On the Road and The Dharma Bums, Vanity of Duluoz presents the formative years in the life of Jack Duluoz--Kerouac's alter ego--beginning with his high school experiences as a sporting jock in small-town New England and his time at Columbia University on a football scholarship. Just as Jack's glamorous new adult life begins, so does World War II, and he joins the US Navy to travel the world. The more he experiences, the more he realizes the limits of his former plans, and decides to and return to New York, where he collides with the start of the Beat movement and a riot of drugs, sex, and writing. Written in 1967, Vanity of Duluoz was Kerouac's final work published before his death in 1969.

"To read On the Road but not Visions of Cody is to take a nice sightseeing tour but to forgo the spectacular rapids of Jack Kerouac's wildest writings."--The New York Times Book Review "The centerpiece of all Kerouac's] novels."--The Washington Post Originally written in 1951-1952, Visions of Cody was an underground classic by the time it was finally published in 1972, three years after Kerouac's death. Utilizing a radical, experimental form ("the New Journalism fifteen years early," as Dennis McNally noted in Desolate Angel), Kerouac examines his own New York life in a collection of colorful stream-of-consciousness essays. Always transfixed by Neal Cassady--here named Cody Pomeray--along with Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, Kerouac also explores the feelings he had for a man who inspired much of his work. Transcribing taped conversations between members of their group as they took drugs and drank, Visions of Cody reveals an intimate portrait of people caught up in destructive relationships with substances, and one another, capturing the members of the Beat Generation in the years before any label had been affixed to them.

From the bard of the Beat Generation comes a profoundly moving, autobiographical novel of childhood and first love. "A surprisingly simple and appealing tale of a young student's fumbling search for love among the high school set . . . at his best, Kerouac] can give you poetic visions of the commonplace."--The New York Times Book Review"She'd cradle my broken head in her all-healing lap that beat like a heart; my eyes hot would feel the soothe fingertips of cool, the joy, the stroke and barely-touch, the feminine sweet loss bemused inward-biting far-thinking deep earth river-mad April caress . . ." This touching novel of adolescent love and loss in a 1930s New England mill town is one of Kerouac's most poignant works. It tells the story of teenager Jack Duluoz, exploring his secret passions, his sporting prowess, and his first romance, with a beautiful Irish girl named Maggie Cassidy. Originally written in 1953, Maggie Cassidy is a remarkable, bittersweet evocation of the awkwardness and joy of growing up in America.

A poignant masterpiece of wrenching personal expression from the acclaimed author of On the Road "In many ways, particularly in the lyrical immediacy that is his distinctive glory, this is Kerouac's best book . . . certainly he has never displayed more 'gentle sweetness.'"--San Francisco Chronicle Jack Kerouac's alter ego Jack Duluoz, overwhelmed by success and excess, gravitates back and forth between wild binges in San Francisco and an isolated cabin on the California coast where he attempts to renew his spirit and clear his head of madness and alcohol. Only nature seems to restore him to a sense of balance. In the words of Allen Ginsberg, Big Sur "reveals consciousness in all its syntactic elaboration, detailing the luminous emptiness of his own paranoiac confusion."

Presents the story of the self-destruction of a beautiful Aztec prostitute enmeshed in the drug underworld of Mexico City

The first novella in Jack Kerouac's Duluoz Legend, detailing the writer's early life as refracted through the prism of the untimely loss of his brother "The earliest and most heartfelt chapter of Kerouac's fictionalized autobiography."--Ann Charters "His life . . . ended when he was nine and the nuns of St. Louis de France Parochial School were at his bedside to take down his dying words because they'd heard his astonishing revelations of heaven delivered in catechism on no more encouragement than it was his turn to speak." Unique among Jack Kerouac's novels, Visions of Gerard captures the scenes and sensations of earliest childhood, the first four years in the life of Ti Jean Duluoz as they unfold in the short, tragic-happy life of his brother, Gerard. Set in Kerouac's hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts, childhood's intensity, innocence, suffering, and delight unfold as Gerard interacts with animals, has visions of Our Lady in heaven, astonishes the priest in the church confessional, and observes his family as they laugh and drink and weep--that is, when he isn't sick and confined to bed. A novel that Kerouac called "my best most serious sad and true book yet," Visions of Gerard is a beautiful, unsettling, and melancholic exploration of the meaning and precariousness of existence.

Two ebullient young men search for Truth the Zen way: from marathon wine-drinking bouts, poetry jam sessions, and "yabyum" in San Francisco's Bohemia to solitude in the high Sierras and a vigil atop Desolation Peak in Washington State. Published just a year after On the Road put the Beat Generation on the map, The Dharma Bums is sparked by Kerouac's expansiveness, humor, and a contagious zest for life.

Letom 1944 goda, posle 8 mesjatsev znakomstva, Berrouz i Keruak okazalis vtjanuty v tragicheskuju situatsiju: Ljusen Karr, prijatel Keruaka, zarezal Devida Kammerera, odnoklassnika Berrouza. Cherez neskolko dnej, ne vyderzhav muk sovesti, on sdalsja vlastjam, no Berrouza i Keruaka politsija privlekla k otvetstvennosti "za nedonositelstvo", i Keruaku dazhe prishlos provesti kakoe-to vremja za reshetkoj. Buduschie zvezdy bit-literatury napisali pod svezhim vpechatleniem sovmestnuju knigu, prichem kazhdyj ozhivil konkretnogo geroja krovavoj dramy.K sozhaleniju poklonnikov, roman "I begemoty svarilis v svoikh bassejnakh" iz-za juridicheskikh prepon uvidel svet lish v 2008 godu, posle smerti Karra.

A brand new volume of previously unpublished writings from the archives reflecting Jack Kerouac’s Buddhist thinkingFrom a young age Kerouac was a spiritual thinker and questioner, and he always considered himself a spiritual writer. Buddhism gave more meaning to Jack’s work as a writer: he was working not for personal accomplishment and glory but for human betterment. And Buddhism justified his lifestyle: with its vision of the material world as empty and illusory, he was free to do what he wanted.This collection shows Jack at his earnest, soulful best. The writing is consistently and wonderfully Kerouacian: it is honest, reflective, heartfelt, and revealing, with great characterizations amid his self-exploration as he wrestles with his consciousness, desperate for belief.

"Big-Sur" - prodolzhenie sagi o Dzheke Duluoze, alter-ego avtora, - odin iz samykh pronzitelnykh i samykh krasivykh tekstov Keruaka. Uzhe napisany "Brodjagi Dkharmy" i "Na doroge", i Dzhek pozhinaet plody svoej vnezapno obrushivshejsja slavy. Zvonki, telegrammy, neproshennye gosti... On chuvstvuet, kak beskonechnyj shalnoj zagul zatjagivaet ego v propast bezumija. I vdrug, kak spasenie posredi narastajuschego koshmara, on poluchaet predlozhenie ot starogo druga - skrytsja ot vsekh v lesnoj khizhine na beregu morja, gde pod shum listvy i priboja on vnov obretet dushevnoe ravnovesie. Dzhek khvataetsja za etu vozmozhnost, kak utopajuschij za solominku...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin BooksTristessa is a strange fever-dream of morphine sickness and belly-deep sadness. Or, in the words of Allen Ginsberg: ‘a narrative meditation studying a hen, a rooster, a dove, a cat, a chihuahua dog, family meat, and a ravishing, ravished junky lady, first in their crowded bedroom, then out to drunken streets, taco stands, and pads at dawn in Mexico City slums’.

Letom 1944 goda, posle 8 mesjatsev znakomstva, Berrouz i Keruak okazalis vtjanuty v tragicheskuju situatsiju: Ljusen Karr, prijatel Keruaka, zarezal Devida Kammerera, odnoklassnika Berrouza. Cherez neskolko dnej, ne vyderzhav muk sovesti, on sdalsja vlastjam, no Berrouza i Keruaka politsija privlekla k otvetstvennosti "za nedonositelstvo", i Keruaku dazhe prishlos provesti kakoe-to vremja za reshetkoj. Buduschie zvezdy bit-literatury napisali pod svezhim vpechatleniem sovmestnuju knigu, prichem kazhdyj ozhivil konkretnogo geroja krovavoj dramy.K sozhaleniju poklonnikov, roman "I begemoty svarilis v svoikh bassejnakh" iz-za juridicheskikh prepon uvidel svet lish v 2008 godu, posle smerti Karra.

Jack Kerouacs roman De underjordiska i översättning av Andreas Vesterlund och med efterord av Peter Glas. De underjordiska är en av Kerouacs många självbiografiska berättelser som bara fått lätt förklädnad genom att de verkliga personerna har fått nya namn. Även platsen har bytts ut - från New York till San Francisco - annars är allt som sker precis vad Kerouac tyckte att han upplevde. Det hela utspelas 1953, under två månader när Kerouac genomlevde en kärleksrelation samtidigt som han festade hårt med vänner och bekanta. Vänkretsen som porträtteras är "denna fantastiska nya förbryllande grupp underjordiska" som Adam Moorad (i verkligheten Allen Ginsberg) hade upptäckt och namngett. "De är hippa utan att vara tillgjorda, intelligenta fast inte töntiga, intellektuella som fan." Gruppen har sina manér och poser: en "underjordisk typ" är inte alls öppenhjärtig och godmodig utan tvärtom "hal och hemlig", men så är de underjordiska också omöjliga att trycka ner, "de är de mest onedtryckbara i hela världen". I denna känslomässigt karga miljö träffar huvudpersonen Leo Percepied (Kerouac) den väna, fina flickan Mardou Fox (Alene Lee). Mardou är "svart överklass", delvis också indian, hon är "ung, sexig, slank, mystisk, hip". Hon är alltid sofistikerat klädd, till exempel i märkliga byxor och med fötterna i sandalremmar, medan Leo beskriver sig själv som "en stor gladlynt huligan" som kan vara så tölpigt klädd att han kan ha en "riktigt anstötlig o-Beach-aktig skjorta". Så visst är de till det yttre ett omaka par. Ändå fungerar de fint ihop. Mardou är "den enda tjejen jag nånsin känt som verkligen kan förstå och sjunga bop" och bop, alltså den improviserade bebopjazzen à la Charlie Parker, är Leos högst älskade musikform, så här har paret en trivsam, rent ut sagt underbar mötesplats. De kan också konsten att småprata tillsammans om allt möjligt. De har så likartade tankar, de "ser samma sak". Sådan är upptakten till denna smärtsamt vackra kärlekshistoria. Ingen kan som Kerouac berätta som det är, som det faktiskt är, utan skygglappar, utan självcensur. Han är inte det minsta rädd för att avslöja sina egna tillkortakommanden. Och Mardou (Alene) stannar i läsarens minne för evigt. De underjordiska (originalets titel: The Subterraneans) i översättning av Andreas Vesterlund och med efterord av Peter Glas. ISBN 978-91-7742-619-6. Högkvalitetspapper, sydda ark, mjuka pärmar med flikomslag, 176 sidor.

A book of letters revealing the inner desires and turmoils of Jack Kerouac after his rise to literary acclaim in the 1960s. In 1960, Jack Kerouac began a correspondence with a New York artist by the name of Jacques Beckwith. The basic subject of their letters was always the same. They each longed to build a cabin in the forest which would serve as a retreat from the pressure and disappointment of the outside world. "I want to live in the woods where I don't even have to think about this evil world of wars and dishonesties," Kerouac wrote. Beckwith offered to help Jack design and build his retreat, but after years of planning only Jacques realized the dream. The world was too much with Kerouac. Alcoholism, a paternity suit, travel, the demands of a writing career, marriage, and eventually his mother's declining health kept him from making his break. These letters document all these distractions and frustrations and reveal Kerouac's desire for the solitude which Beckwith found in the New England woods.