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› Find signed collectible books: 'Against Nature'
Resisting the traditional model of nineteenth-century fiction, Joris-Karl Huysman produced in 1884 a novel unlike any other of his time. Against Nature is the story of Des Esseintes, an aesthete who attempts to escape Paris and, along with it, the vulgarity of modern life. As Des Esseintes hides away in his museum of high taste, Huysman offers the reader a treasury of cultural delights and anticipates many aspects of twentieth century modernism. Supplemented by notes and a critical introduction, this new translation is sure to engage today's reader. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Against the Grain'
A Rebours (Against the Grain) (1884), was a break from Naturalism for the French writer, and became the ultimate example of 'decadent' literature. It features a single character, the aesthete Des Esseintes, an eccentric, reclusive antihero. It gained further notoriety as an exhibit during the trials of Oscar Wilde in 1895, during which the prosecutor referred to the novel as a "sodomitical" book. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Against the Grain: (A Rebours'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Beat Generation: Glory Days in Greenwich Village'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Big Sky Mind : Buddhism and the Beat Generation'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Big Sur'
Kerouac's gritty, moving take on the destruction of his own myth, as the King of the Beats approaches middle age! Unmistakably autobiographical, Big Sur, Kerouac's ninth novel, was written as the 'King of the Beats' was approaching middle-age and reflects his struggle to come to terms with his own myth. The magnificent and moving story of Jack Duluoz, a man blessed by great talent and cursed with an urge towards self-destruction, Big Sur is at once Kerouac's toughest and his most humane work. [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'Bone Palace Ballet: New Poems'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Collected Letters, 1944-1967'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Coney Island of the Mind: Poems'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Cultural History of Tibet'
"If there is a lake, the swans would go there."
So said the 16th Karmapa when asked why he visited America in 1976. Of course, the Karmapa wasn't the first swan to go to the lake. In a book of immense scope, Rick Fields surveys the history of Buddhism in America from the quasi-legendary Fu-sang in the sixth century to Asian immigrant communities to the latest trends in American Buddhism. Writing as a storyteller as much as a historian, Fields takes us back to the earliest European contacts with Buddhism, most notably, Sir William Jones, who was just about to go to America on the recommendation of Ben Franklin, when at the last minute, fortunately, he chose India. His work would influence the American Transcendentalists and eventually the great Theosophist and first American convert to Buddhism, Henry Steel Olcott. A sympathetic writer, Fields is also meticulously inclusive. Besides the obvious transmitters, like D.T. Suzuki and Philip Kapleau, Fields traces the forgotten influences of Paul Carus, Ernest Fenollosa, and Dharmapala. One memorable story is of the ex-Navy submarine mechanic Heng Ju, who walked, three steps then a kowtow, over and over, all the way from San Francisco to Seattle for a berry pie. Fields has countless other stories that make How the Swans Came to the Lake a priceless contribution not only to Buddhism in America but to Buddhism itself. --Brian Bruya [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Desolate Angel - A Biography : Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation and America'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation, and America'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beats and America'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Desolation Angels'
› Find signed collectible books: 'Dharma Bums'
One of the best and most popular of Kerouac's autobiographical novels, The Dharma Bums is based on experiences the writer had during the mid-1950s while living in California, after he'd become interested in Buddhism's spiritual mode of understanding. One of the book's main characters, Japhy Ryder, is based on the real poet Gary Snyder, who was a close friend and whose interest in Buddhism influenced Kerouac. This book is a must-read for any serious Kerouac fan. [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'Dharma Lion: A Critical Biography of Allen Ginsberg'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Dot and the Line'
Hardcover book, with dust jacket, 2001. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathemetics'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test'
They say if you remember the '60s, you weren't there. But, fortunately, Tom Wolfe was there, notebook in hand, politely declining LSD while Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters fomented revolution, turning America on to a dangerously playful way of thinking as their Day-Glo conveyance, Further, made the most influential bus ride since Rosa Parks's. By taking On the Road's hero Neal Cassady as his driver on the cross-country revival tour and drawing on his own training as a magician, Kesey made Further into a bully pulpit, and linked the beat epoch with hippiedom. Paul McCartney's Many Years from Now cites Kesey as a key influence on his trippy Magical Mystery Tour film. Kesey temporarily renounced his literary magic for the cause of "tootling the multitudes"--making a spectacle of himself--and Prankster Robert Stone had to flee Kesey's wild party to get his life's work done. But in those years, Kesey's life was his work, and Wolfe infinitely multiplied the multitudes who got tootled by writing this major literary-journalistic monument to a resonant pop-culture moment.
Kesey's theatrical metamorphosis from the distinguished author of One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest to the abominable shaman of the "Acid Test" soirees that launched The Grateful Dead required Wolfe's Day-Glo prose account to endure (though Kesey's own musings in Demon Box are no slouch either). Even now, Wolfe's book gives what Wolfe clearly got from Kesey: a contact high. --Tim Appelo [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The First Third & Other Writings'
Immortalized as Dean Moriarty by Jack Kerouac in his epic novel, On the Road, Neal Cassady was infamous for his unstoppable energy and his overwhelming charm, his savvy hustle and his devil-may-care attitude. A treasured friend and traveling companion of Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Ken Kesey, to name just some of his cohorts on the beatnik path, Cassady lived life to the fullest, ready for inspiration at any turn.Before he died in Mexico in 1968, just four days shy of his forty-second birthday, Cassady had written the jacket blurb for this book: "Seldom has there been a story of a man so balled up. No doubt many readers will not believe the veracity of the author, but I assure these doubting Thomases that every incident, as such, is true."As Ferlingetti writes in his editor's note, Cassady was "an early prototype of the urban cowboy who a hundred years ago might have been an outlaw on the range." Here are his autobiographical writings, the rambling American saga of a truly free individual. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Howl, and Other Poems'
The epigraph for Howl is from Walt Whitman: "Unscrew the locks from the doors!/Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!" Announcing his intentions with this ringing motto, Allen Ginsberg published a volume of poetry which broke so many social taboos that copies were impounded as obscene, and the publisher, poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, was arrested. The court case that followed found for Ginsberg and his publisher, and the publicity made both the poet and the book famous. Ginsberg went on from this beginning to become a cultural icon of sixties radicalism. This works seminal place in the culture is indicated in Czeslaw Milosz's poetic tribute to Ginsberg: "Your blasphemous howl still resounds in a neon desert where the human tribe wanders, sentenced to unreality". [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Howl: Original Draft Facsimile, Transcript & Variant Versions, Fully Annotated by Author, With Contemporaneous Correspondence, Account of First Publ'
Published in 1956 as the title poem of Allen Ginsberg's first collection, "Howl" is a prophetic masterpiece that overcame censorship trails to become one of the most widely read poems of the century. The annotated Howl is the poet's own re-creation of the long process of composition of a revolutionary poem that broke new ground in America poetry through its expansive poetic form, tonal range, and freshness of spirit.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Indian Journals'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Indian Journals March 1962-May 1963: Notebooks Diary Blank Pages Writings'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Jack's Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Memoirs of a Beatnik'
› Find signed collectible books: 'Minor Characters'
Johnson considers her personal history within the larger framework of the Beat movement and American society. Memories of a conventional Jewish middle-class upbringing and her revolt against it are interwoven with the early experiences of people she would meet later: Jack Kerouac (her boyfriend in the late 1950s), Allen Ginsberg, and others are evaluated with perceptive authority. Johnson's elegant prose is carefully wrought and thoughtfully measured in a way that Beat literature seldom was. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Minor Characters : A Beat Memoir'
National Book Critics Circle Award-winner, Minor Characters has deservedly become known among the cognoscenti as a classic about the 1950s, a vivid and compelling memoir of one woman's coming of age amidst the angels and poets of the Beat Generation. The friend and lover of Jack Kerouac during the two years surrounding the publication of On The Road --the book that made him suddenly and forever famous--Johnson describes with penetrating insight the circle of rebellious visionaries of which she became a part: Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, LeRoi Jones, Gregory Corso. But more than just chronicling the drama of her life with a diffident and often drunken Kerouac, Johnson describes the roles that she and the other women in her circle played as companions and acolytes to their male muses, women who set aside their own needs and ambitions, for a time, even as they searched to find their own voices and shape their own lives. As Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote in The New York Times, Johnson "has brought to life what history may ultimately judge to have been minor characters, but who were to her own generation major enough to shape its consciousness." Anchor Books is proud to be reissuing Minor Characters with a new introduction by the author that helps to place the Beat Generation in the context of the 1990s.
"Realistic rather than flamboyant, Johnson succeeds in portraying the Beats not as oddities or celebrities but as individuals. In wry retrospect, she recognizes the folly of young women rebelling against their well-meaning parents only to become subservient to indifferent men."--The New Yorker
"Johnson writes of Dostoevskian evenings, of Kerouac's disastrous confrontation with fame...of the major Beat voices and the minor characters, their women. It's a terrific book, rich and beautifully written, full of vivid portraits and evocations."--San Francisco Chronicle [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Naked Lunch'
"He was," as Salon's Gary Kamiya notes, "20th-century drug culture's Poe, its Artaud, its Baudelaire. He was the prophet of the literature of pure experience, a phenomenologist of dread.... Burroughs had the scary genius to turn the junk wasteland into a parallel universe, one as thoroughly and obsessively rendered as Blake's."
Why has this homosexual ex-junkie, whose claim to fame rests entirely on one book--the hallucinogenic ravings of a heroine addict--so seized the collective imagination? Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch in a Tangier, Morocco, hotel room between 1954 and 1957. Allen Ginsberg and his beatnik cronies burst onto the scene, rescued the manuscript from the food-encrusted floor, and introduced some order to the pages. It was published in Paris in 1959 by the notorious Olympia Press and in the U.S. in 1962; the landmark obscenity trial that ensued served to end literary censorship in America.
Burroughs's literary experiment--the much-touted "cut-up" technique--mirrored the workings of a junkie's brain. But it was junk coupled with vision: Burroughs makes teeming amalgam of allegory, sci-fi, and non-linear narration, all wrapped in a blend of humor--slapstick, Swiftian, slang-infested humor. What is Naked Lunch about? People turn into blobs amidst the sort of evil that R. Crumb, in the decades to come, would inimitably flesh out with his dark and creepy cartoon images. Perhaps the most easily grasped part of Naked Lunch is its America-bashing, replete with slang and vitriol. Read it and see for yourself. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'On the Road'
In its time Jack Kerouac's masterpiece was the bible of the Beat Generation, the essential prose accompaniment to Allen Ginsberg's Howl . While it stunned the public and literary establishment when it was published in 1957, it is now recognized as an American classic. With On the Road , Kerouac discovered his voice and his true subject-the search for a place as an outsider in America. On the Road swings to the rhythms of fifties underground America, jazz, sex, generosity, chill dawns, and drugs, with Sal Paradise and his hero Dean Moriarty, traveler and mystic, the living epitome of Beat. "Life is great, and few can put the zest and wonder and sadness and humor of it on paper more interestingly than Kerouac." -Luther Nichols, San Francisco Examiner "Just as, more than any other novel of the Twenties, The Sun Also Rises came to be regarded as the testament of the Lost Generation, so it seems certain that On the Road will come to be known as that of the Beat Generation." -Gilbert Millstein, The New York Times @Didn'tTypeOnTP! For TWITTERATURE of On the Road by Jack Kerouac, please see On the Road by Jack Kerouac. From Twitterature: The World's Greatest Books in Twenty Tweets or Less [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Paradise Outlaws: Remembering the Beats'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Portable Beat Reader'
The Portable Beat Reader is an excellent and thorough study of the Beat Generation, compiled and edited by Ann Charters, biographer of Jack Kerouac and one of our most notable experts on Beat literature and ideas. This lively work of scholarship goes deeply into the history of the Beat movement, investigating events such as the discovery (by writer William Burroughs) of the word beat to describe this literary generation. The reader includes essays on all the major prose and poetry writers, such as Allen Ginsberg, and offers rare insight into the literary-historical context of the movement. [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'Queer Beats: How the Beats Turned America on to Sex'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Reality Sandwiches, 1953-1960'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Rebours'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Recollections of My Life As a Woman: The New York Years'
An evocative, gritty memoir by the leading woman writer of the Beat Generation.
In this rich and passionate memoir, influential poet Diane di Prima explores the first three decades of her extraordinary life. Only by heroic effort was she able to break away from her intense Brooklyn Italian family to follow through on the lifelong commitment to poetry she made in high school. Immersed in the proto-Beat world of Manhattan's early 1950s Bohemia, she emerged as a major force, not only establishing herself as a poet, but also coediting the influential literary newsletter, The Floating Bear, and cofounding The Poet's Theatre.
Recollections of My Life as a Woman chronicles the intense, creative cauldron of those years as the Beat movement emerged on both coasts, and the country accelerated into the sixties. Poetry, painting, dance, and theater flowed into one another, and well-known figures from all those worlds-including Merce Cunningham, Frank O'Hara, Audre Lorde, Trisha Brown, and Franz Kline-move through her story. Di Prima was a deliberate single parent at a time when that was unheard of, and her relationships and sexuality were as revolutionary as her writing. This is a powerful and unique remembering of how one woman's life revealed itself to her. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Snarkout Boys & the Baconburg Horror'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Soft Machine'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Some of the Dharma'
Written during a critical period of his life, "Some of the Dharma" is a key volume in Jack Kerouac's vast autobiographical canon. He began writing it in 1953 as reading notes on Buddhism intended for his friend, poet Allen Ginsberg. As Kerouac's Buddhist study and meditation practice intensified, what had begun as notes evolved into a vast and all-encompassing work of nonfiction into which he poured his life, incorporating poems, haiku, prayers, journal entries, meditations, fragments of letters, ideas about writing, overheard conversations, sketches, blues, 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 which Kerouac so painstakingly gave the book on his manual typewriter is re-created in this typeset facsimile. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Spontaneous Mind: Selected Interviews, 1958-1996'
The interviews collected in Spontaneous Mind, chronologically arranged and in some cases previously unpublished, were conducted throughout Allen Ginsberg's long career. Always a candid and engaging subject, Ginsberg considered the interview an art form, as well as an opportunity to get his message across to many people, which, as a student of Eastern religions, he believed was his spiritual obligation. In these interviews, dating from the late 1950s to the mid-1990s, Ginsberg speaks frankly about his life, his work, and the events of his time.
Ginsberg's progressive and controversial views on politics and censorship dominate his interviews, from his conversation with the conservative William F. Buckley on PBS to his comments in the Dartmouth Review about U.S. policy in Central America to his testimony at the Chicago Seven trial. Ginsberg discusses his literary influences, including Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Walt Whitman, and William Blake, and offers insights into his own poetry, particularly his innovations in rhythm, meter, and syllable emphasis. A well-known experimenter with drugs, campaigner for their legalization, and believer in their ability to expand consciousness, Ginsberg here describes his LSD trips and his marijuana highs, and explains how they influenced the creation of "Kaddish" and other works. And he talks about his personal life with candor, revealing details of his sexual affairs with fellow Beats Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, and Neal Cassady, and his longtime relationship with Peter Orlovsky.
Provocative and illuminating, Spontaneous Mind allows us to hear once again the impassioned voice of one of the most influential literary and cultural figures of our time. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Starting from San Francisco.'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Subterraneans'
In "Subterraneans" Leo and Mardou live amongst the Subterraneans who haunt the bars and clubs of San Fransisco and have a bittersweet love affair. In "Pic", on the road but not yet overawed, ten-year-old Pic tells the story in the Negro dialect of the North Carolina farm country. [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'Tales Of Beatnik Glory'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists and Muses at the Heart of a Revolution'
Female Beats wrote poetry, took drugs, went on the road, listened to jazz, and lived on the fringe just as the men did, but their accomplishments are not as widely recognized. This volume attempts to correct this oversight by profiling 40 women of the Beat generation and publishing samples of their work. Well-known poets Diane di Prima and Denise Levertov appear in the volume, along with the muses of male writers and other women who never became famous at all. As Brenda Knight notes in her introduction, counterculture women in the 1950s and 1960s faced difficult obstacles: "To be unmarried, a poet, an artist, to bear biracial children, to go on the road was doubly shocking for a woman, and social condemnation was high." The first portion of the anthology is devoted to women who were not Beats but who set the stage for the movement. Josephine Miles wrote poetry and mentored the younger Beat poets at Berkeley, while Madeline Gleason founded the San Francisco Poetry Festival. In the "Muses" section are short biographies of wives and girlfriends of famous male writers such as Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady. It's widely known that William S. Burroughs shot his wife Joan Vollmer Adams Burroughs; this book fills in other details of her wild and short life. Profiles of writers such as Joyce Johnson, Hettie Jones, Janna McClure, and Janine Pommy Vega account for the rest of the anthology. The lives these women led are as interesting as their writing, and Women of the Beat Generation honors their determination to live outside the mainstream. --Jill Marquis [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists and Muses at the Heart of a Revolution'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'El Almuerzo Desnudo'
Esta novela, una de las mas miticas de la literatura norteamericana, es un descenso a los infiernos de la droga y una denuncia horrorizada y sardonica, onirica y alucinatoria de la sociedad actual, un mundo sin esperanza ni futuro. Burroughs dispara sus flechas contra las religiones, el ejercito, la universidad, la sexualidad, la justicia corrupta, los traficantes tramposos, el colonialismo, la burocracia, y la psiquiatria representada por el siniestro Dr. Benway, el gran manipulador de conciencias, el experto en Control total. / Naked Lunch, one of the most mythical novels of North American literature, is a descent into the hellfire of drugs, and a horrified, sardonic, dreamlike and hallucinatory denouncement of todays society, a world with no hope and no future. Burroughs fires his arrows against religion, the army, university, sexuality, the corruption of justice, cheating dealers, colonialism, bureaucracy and the psychiatry represented by the sinister Dr. Benway, the great manipulator of consciences, the expert of total Control. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'En el Camino'
Este libro fue la Biblia y el manifiesto de la generacion beat y se ha convertido en una novela de culto y en un clasico de la literatura norteamericana. Se narran aqui los viajes enloquecidos, a bordo de Cadillacs prestados y Dodges desvencijados, de un mitico hipster y un narrador. Esta es la cronica de unos protagonistas que fueron en la vida real: Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg y William Burroughs. [via]
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