GORDON BALL
Scenes from East Hill Farm: Seasons With Allen Ginsberg. Beat Scene Press Pocket Book No. 13., Coventry, England. 2007.

Dark Music. Cityful Press, Longmont, Co., 2006.
Dark Music intertwines personal memories and daily epiphanies instartling visual images asit examines the nature of consciousness -- the mean, shapes, and forms --by which we know (or think we know) reality. "All is not lost as long as such transmission of dharma graces us." --Lawrence Ferlinghetti

WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
Everything Lost: The Latin American Notebook of William S. Burroughs. Trans. by Geoffrey D. Smith, John M. Bennett, and Oliver Harris. Columbus, Ohio: The Ohio State University Press, 2007.
In late summer 1953, as he returned to Mexico City after a seven-month expedition through the jungles of Ecuador, Colombia, and Peru, William Burroughs began a notebook of final reflections on his four years in Latin America. His first novel, Junkie, had just been published and he would soon be back in New York to meet Allen Ginsberg and together complete the manuscripts of what became The Yage Letters and Queer. Yet this notebook, the sole survivor from that period, reveals Burroughs not as a writer on the verge of success, but as a man staring down personal catastrophe and visions of looming cultural disaster. Losses that will not let go of him haunt Burroughs throughout the notebook: “Bits of it keep floating back to me like memories of a daytime nightmare.” However, out of these dark reflections we see emerge vivid fragments of Burroughs’ fiction and, even more tellingly, unique, primary evidence for the remarkable ways in which his early manuscripts evolved. (Book description from Amazon.com)

Junky: The Definitive Text of “Junk.” 50th Anniversary Definitive Edition. Edited with an introduction by Oliver Harris. New York, Penguin, 2003.
Burroughs’ first novel, which he called “Junk,” was published as Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict in 1953, an Ace Books double-decker paperback (with Narcotic Agent by Maurice Helbrant). Although over 100,000 copies were sold, the novel received no critical attention until after the publication of Naked Lunch in 1959. For this fiftieth-anniversary edition, Burroughs scholar Oliver Harris has painstakingly recreated the author’s original text and restored the original title, “Junk,” in the subtitle. He has also written a comprehensive introduction that provides the biographical context, as well as the history of the writing, editing, and publication of Burroughs’ first novel. Appendices include Burroughs’ own unpublished introduction, an omitted chapter, and auxiliary texts by Allen Ginsberg and others.

NEAL CASSADY
The Collected Letters of Neal Cassady. Ed. Dave Moore. New York: Penguin, 2005.
Includes an introduction by Carolyn Cassady.

GREGORY CORSO
Storie 56: Gregory Corso – Deluge. Rome, Italty: Storie, 2005.
Published in Rome, Italy, Storie Number 56 is the Special Gregory Corso issue. A Beat Generation poet who ran the streets of the New York poetry scene with Allen Ginsberg, Herbert Huncke and others, Gregory Corso was a complicated man who wrote brilliant poetry. This issue features essays, poetry and memoirs about Corso by contributors including Gerald Nicosia, Michael Skau and Herschel Silverman. Text is in English and Italian.

DIANE DI PRIMA
Revolutionary Letters. Last Gasp Press, September 2006.
This edition is the new volume of di Prima's classic Revolutionary Letters. There are some new pieces added in, and new edits on older pieces, done by the author.

ALLEN GINSBERG AND WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
The Yage Letter Redux. Ed. Oliver Harris. San Francisco, California: City Lights Books, 2006.
In January 1953, William Burroughs began a seven-month expedition into the jungles of South America, ostensibly to find yagé, the fabled hallucinogen of the Amazon. From the notebooks he kept and the letters he wrote home to Allen Ginsberg, Burroughs composed a narrative of his adventures that was first published piecemeal in magazines and eventually appeared ten years later as “In Search of Yage” within The Yage Letters. The book published by City Lights in 1963 was completed by the addition of Ginsberg’s account of his own experience with yagé and by the inclusion of other Burroughs letters and texts. For this new edition, Burroughs scholar Oliver Harris has gone back to the original manuscripts and untangled the history of the text, revealing that the original drafts were not epistolary. Appendices include previously unpublished primary materials by Burroughs and selections from Ginsberg’s 1960 South American journal.

JOHN HOFFMAN (See Philip Lamantia)

JACK KEROUAC
On the Road. The scroll typescript. New York: Viking, 2007.

Book of Sketches. New York: Penguin, 2006.

JOANNE KYGER
About Now: The Collected Poetry of Joanne Kyger. Orono, Maine: The National Poetry Foundation, 2007.

EDIE KEROUAC-PARKER
You'll Be Okay: My Life With Jack Kerouac. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2007.

PHILIP LAMANTIA AND JOHN HOFFMAN
Tau and Journey to the End. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2008.
Two long-lost volumes from the classic Beat period. Tau is Philip Lamantia's mystical second collection of poems, originally slated for publication in 1955, but suppressed by the poet due to his evolving religious beliefs. Journey to the End contains the poems of the legendary John Hoffman (1928-1952), whose poems were read by Lamantia in 1955 at the 6 Gallery reading where Allen Ginsberg debuted "Howl." (Book description from Amazon.com)

ELIZABETH VON VOGT
JACK KEROUAC at 681 LEXINGTON AVENUE. Beat Scene Press Pocket Series No. 9. Coventry, England, 2007.

681 Lexington Avenue: A Beat Education in New York City 1947-1954. Ten O'Clock Press, Wooster, Ohio, forthcoming Summer 2008.

ANNE WALDMAN
Outrider: Essay, Poems, Interviews. La Almeda Press, October 2006.

PHILIP WHALEN
The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen. by Philip Whalen, Gary Snyder (Contributor), Leslie Scalapino (Contributor), and edited by Michael Rothenberg. Wesleyan University Press, 2007.
O ne of the most path-breaking and creatively radical poets of the San Francisco Renaissance, Philip Whalen was part of the 1955 Six Gallery reading where the West Coast Beat movement famously began. Working alongside Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and Jack Kerouac, Whalen developed a conversational and visually unorthodox style that is unique in contemporary poetry. His lifelong engagement with the impermanent and sensuous, concerns deepened by his commitment to Zen Buddhism, are on rich display here, along with his warm humor and original illustrations. This Collected Poems rightfully places Whalen among the foremost poets of his time, offering readers a truly major body of American poetic work. (Book description from Amazon. com)

ruth weiss
white is all colors. Donau, Austria: Edition Thanhauser, 2004.
Recent poems in English and Germs. Line drawings by Paul Blake.

BEAT SCHOLARSHIP

Recent (2004-08), Forthcoming, and Works in Progress

"Missing a Beat" by Mark Cohen in Zeek: A Jewish Journal of Thought
> and Culture: http://www.zeek.net/709beat/. This is a study of critic Seymour Krim.

Allen Ginsberg’s Buddhist Poetics by Tony Trigilio. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Fall 2007.
From "Howl” to “Hum” is the first sustained scholarly effort to take (and to test) Ginsberg’s poetry at its word as “Buddhist” poetry. Rather than assume a liberationist approach to Ginsberg's Buddhism or claim that he studied Buddhism as a scholar might, this book explores Ginsberg's Buddhism as an imperfect but deepening influence on the major poems of his career. Working with materials from the Stanford University Ginsberg Papers, Naropa University lecture transcripts, Ginsberg’s Dharma teaching notes, and the poet’s correspondence, Trigilio frames Ginsberg’s Buddhist poetics within the major cultural and aesthetic contexts of the poet’s career: the rise of an American Buddhism in the postwar United States; the antiwar, drug decriminalization, and gay civil rights movements; and the shift from modern to postmodern strategies in contemporary U.S. poetry.

Kerouac: His Life and Work by Paul Maher, Jr. Taylor Trade Publishing. 2007.
This authoritative biography of writer, poet, and beat generation icon Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) recounts in gripping detail the story of his exceptional life and the key relationships that affected Kerouac's development as an artist, including those with his three wives, numerous girlfriends, and beloved mother. [Maher] presents a fresh and more accurate account of the author of On the Road, one that neither ignores nor wallows in his flaws. From Amazon.com.

Jack Kerouac and the Literary Imagination by Nancy M. Grace. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, January 2007.
Jack Kerouac and the Literary Imagination explores Kerouac's fiction, poetry, religious writing, private journals, and correspondence as literary texts revealing his aesthetic vision for American belle letters - one embracing the confessional, rhapsodic, sermonic, and comic. The vision encompasses his fictional rewriting of his personal life, his life-long quest for spiritual enlightenment - both Christian and Buddhist - and his resolute belief in the blending of popular and academic cultural artifacts to create voices and forms that would speak of and to a new age. The book focuses on his use of film, comic book characters, and jazz, as well as his indebtedness to texts as diverse as James Joyce's Ulysses, St. Teresa de Avila's prayers and confessions, William Gibson's The Shadow, the Apocrypha, Gene Autry's B-movie westerns, and Goethe's Faust.” -- Amazon.com Includes analysis of Some of the Dharma, Doctor Sax, On the Road, Desolation Angels, Mexico City Blues, Windblown World, Old Angel Midnight, and other Kerouac texts.

The Encyclopedia of Beat Literature edited by Kurt Hemmer. Facts on File, 2007.
In an an A-to-Z format, The Encyclopedia of Beat Literature contains dozens of entries on all the major figures and great works of the Beat movement. Contributors include distinguished Beat scholars and friends of the Beat Generation, including the Beat poets Andy Clausen and Ed Sanders. Other features include a foreword by Ann Charters, an afterword by Tim Hunt, and photographs by the legendary Beat photographer Larry Keenan. Coverage includes: (1) Synopses and critical analyses of fiction, poetry, and essays by Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, and other major Beat writers, with notes on background and critical reception; (2) Women of the Beat Generation: Hettie Jones, Joyce Johnson, Janine Pommy Vega, and more; and (3) Family, friends, and associates of the Beats, including Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, and John Lennon.

Jonah Raskin's long essay (7,500 words) on the role of Jewish writers and poet in the Beat Generation and in Bohemian circles has just been published in Volume 2 of Jews and American Popular Culture, edited by Paul Buhle and published by Praeger.

Action Writing: Jack Kerouac's Wild Form by Michael Hrebeniak. Southern Illinois University Press, June 2006.
Action Writing: Jack Kerouac’s Wild Form connects the personal and creative development of the Beat generation’s famous icon with societal changes in postwar America. Michael Hrebeniak asserts that Jack Kerouac’s “wild form”—writing that is free of literary, grammatical, and syntactical conventions—moves within an experimental continuum across the arts to generate a Dionysian sense of writing as raw process. Action Writing highlights how Kerouac made concrete his 1952 intimation of “something beyond the novel” by assembling ideas from Beat America, modernist poetics, action painting, bebop, and subterranean oral traditions. Hrebeniak further explores how the Cold War provided political potency for Kerouac’s assertion of the Blake-Whitman lineage of poet as seer and chronicler, by which language itself becomes the instrument of revelation.

Neal Cassady: The Fast Life of a Beat Hero by David Sandison and Graham Vickers. Chicago, Illinois: Chicago Review Press, September 2006.
The primary goal of this new biography is to separate the facts of Cassady's life from the various legends that surround it. Thus, the narrative begins with numerous true and fabricated versions of its subject's birth, after which it diligently pursues the facts behind Cassady's often exaggerated road trips and sexual encounters. While a great deal of the book recounts Cassady's influential friendships with Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, the character who is most vividly and sympathetically brought to life is Carolyn Cassady, Neal's wife for 20 years. . . . . The story clips along steadily and the prose is consistently sharp, but Sandison (Jack Kerouac), who died in 2004, and Vickers (21st-Century Hotel) offer scant analysis of Cassady's character. The authors do have a strong sense of movement and scope, however, which renders this a crucial tool in understanding the life, if not the mind, of Neal Cassady. – from Publishers Weekly

The Lost Years of William S. Bourroughs: The Beats in South Texas by Rob Johnson. Austin, Texas: The University of Texas Press, 2006.
The sometimes raunchy, often legally dubious New York and Mexican exploits of William S. Burroughs, one of the godfathers of the "Beat" generation, are well known. Less familiar are his experiences in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of South Texas, where for several years he was a cotton farmer (while avoiding the law in New York). This intriguing chapter in the famous author’s life is thoroughly recounted for the first time in Rob Johnson’s new book.” – Amazon.com
Conversations with Jack Kerouac edited by Kevin J. Hayes. Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2005.
Conversations with Jack Kerouac features interviews ranging from 1958 to 1969, covering the breadth of the author’s fame and literary output.

Reconstructing the Beats edited by Jennie Skerl. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2005.
"Skerl has gathered a collection of innovative essays here that exemplify the most recent recontextualizations and reassessments of Beat Culture and its practitioners. Scholars and students of the field will find the familiar media stereotypes and cliches and the critical canons and legends about the Beats challenged and re-envisioned. Canonical Beat writers are resituated within a collective and interdisciplinary context where the influences of jazz, abstract impressionism and action painting, performance art, the international avant-gardes, and Buddhism are explored more vigorously than ever before. Critically overlooked African-American and female Beat writers are not only recovered for serious analysis, but restored to the recognition they actually enjoyed within the movement itself. This welcome collection is a sophisticated and accessible resource for anyone interested in the aesthetics and politics of twentieth-century American counter-culture."--Robin Lydenberg, author of Word Cultures: William S. Burroughs' Experimental Fiction

The Beat Face of God: The Beat Generation Writers as Spirit Guides by Stephen D. Edington. Foreword by David Amram. Victoria, BC, Canada: Trafford Publishing 2005.
“Thanks to Steve Edington we now have a book that tells us . . . how spirituality was a central part of our lives during an amazing time, and among an amazing group of people – many of whom have left us work of enduring value. The fact that so many of us found one another, haphazardly criss-crossing paths as kindred spirits, was a miracle in itself. It also produced some miraculous results, many of which Edington has written about.” – David Amran, preface to Beat Face of God
Holy Goof: A Biography of Neal Cassady by William Plummer. Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2004.

Beat Culture: Lifestyles, Icons, and Impact edited by William T. Lawlor, Editor. 2005.
The coverage of this book ranges from Jack Kerouac's tales of freedom-seeking Bohemian youth to the frenetic paintings of Jackson Pollock, including 60 years of the Beat Generation and the artists of the Age of Spontaneity.

Naked Angels: The Lives and Literature of the Beat Generation by John Tytell. Ivan R. Dee, 2006. Third Printing.
Energy, conviction, and unexpected brilliance.-New Yorker. The definitive history of the 'beat generation'.... It is an authoritative piece of literary history as a result of which Kerouac, Burroughs, and Ginsberg will be read with greater understanding, sympathy, and insight.-Leon Edel. Naked Angels is continually illuminating...written with insight, passion, and an awareness of just how prophetic these men were in their lives and works. I consider it an essential book.-John Clellon Holmes. Strong, urgent, ultimately thrilling.-Peter Schjeldahl, New York Times Book Review.

Forthcoming 2008-09

Inventing Jack Kerouac: Reception and Reputation 1957-2004 by Ronna C. Johnson. The Camden House Press series, Studies in English and American Literature, Linguistics, and Culture, forthcoming 2007.
A comprehensive review and assessment of three strains in Kerouac’s reception responsible for his reputation: biographical studies; mass media reviews and essays; and literary critical academic essays and books. Using reader-response theory to examine the over 20 Kerouac biographies shows that projections of the biographer (scholar, journalist or fan) distort and override the record to create or justify a culturally or socially overdetermined imago – invention – of Kerouac. The study similarly argues that misprisions in mainstream media attention to his work – the foundation of his reputation – have skewed and prejudiced Kerouac’s popular and academic critical reception. The book evaluates the renaissance in Kerouac studies of the early 1980s, a short-lived efflorescence of objective, substantive literary criticism. It concludes with critical-theoretical work from the turn into the 21st century, latter day inventions that reevaluate Kerouac’s writing through issues salient in postwar postmodern American arts and culture.

The New Vision: Jack Kerouac in the 1940s by Paul Maher, Jr. Southern Illinois University Press, forthcomoing 2009.
A narrative of Kerouac's formative years as a writer, his interests in philosophy and literature and examines the key writings that remain unpublished. Based on original archival research.

Naked Lunch at 50, edited by Oliver Harris and Ian MacFayden. Southern Illinois University Press, forthcoming 2009.

Works in Progress

1. Ann and Sam Charters – The authorized biography of John Clellon Holmes

2. John Suiter – The authorized biography of Gary Snyder

3. Hilary Holiday – a biography of Herbert Huncke

4. Fiona Paton --
a. A long paper titled "Whither Goest Thou America?: On the Road as Elegiac Romance,” which argues that the novel is a national elegy as well as a personal elegy for lost fathers. She reads On the Road through its allusions to othertexts (Cervantes, Rabelais, Alain Fournier, Kipling as well as obvious American references) but also grounds it in the postwar political situation. The absent father motif noted by other critics (more or less in passing) is a central theme and link that to the political anxieties surrounding Truman in the late 1940s.
b. An essay on The Beats considered as a group in relation to psychoanalysis, but with particular focus on Kerouac, his knowledge of Freud, Jung, Adler,Horney etc, and relevance of psychonanalysis to his work despite his own often dismissive (and defensive) treatment of it. The essay includes a reading of unpublished letters from the Ginsberg Columbia archive as part of this research.
c. A long Burroughs article, “Monstrous Rhetoric”
d. A paper still at the reading/research stage called “‘They caught the boy doing something disgusting’: What William S. Burroughs Learned from Theodore Sturgeon.”

Dissertations

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