New Publications

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Index

NEW :

Other Publications

Three new cut-up books from Moloko Print

A new edition of Burroughs’ long-out-of-print fourth cut-up novel

NEW PUBLICATIONS

Almost Patagonia: A Chapbook, A. Robert Lee, Bournbrook Magazine, 2023

In Almost Patagonia: A Chapbook, A. Robert Lee adds a postscript to his antic trilogy of Suspicious Circumstances: An Album of Events and Oddities with Thoughts on the Word What (2020), Outside In:Hinges and Swivels (2022) and Everywhere You Look (2023). Riffs in alternating prose and verse.

Sure, Patagonia is real geography. South America. Wide and deep land expanse. Washed by the Atlantic and Pacific. Lower Andes. Tierra del Fuego. Co-administered by Chile and Argentina. Desert sun yet archipelago lash of tempest. Within reach of the Antarctic. Whale and raptor. Guanaco and penguin. A place to touch and travel.

But what of borrowing Patagonia as metaphor for the world you inhabit? Yourself a kind of Gulliver. Trump politics. The wrap of commercials. Word salads. Remembered noises. Body parts like feet. Language, as it were, beyond English or Spanish. At times you might imagine yourself on a Science Fiction planet, geography like no other.

Bournbrook Press is pleased to provide a guide.

Beat Myths in Literature, Estíbaliz Encarnación-Pinedo, Routledge, september 2023.

Beat Myths in Literature reassesses the work of women poets associated with the Beat Generation from the critical lens of revisionist discourses. Using the metaphor and the critical lens of looking back, an act infused with feminist implications after Adrienne Rich (1972), the volume focuses on poetry, fiction, and autobiographical writing to analyze the different ways in which Beat women used revisionist discourses to refashion the Beat Generation and establish themselves as literary and artistic subjects. Offering the first comprehensive study of the use of mythology in the Beat Generation, Beat Myths in Literature: Revisionist Strategies in Beat Women focuses on the specific re-writing or revisioning of mythical texts. As such, it studies the ways in which Beat poets incorporate mythology into their works, both through the feminist reinvention or appropriation of ancient myths, but also by debunking more contemporary myths used to contain women in particular social and artistic roles. Furthermore, this volume expands Rich’s notion of re-vision, considering memoirs and autobiographies as factual and fictional re-interpretations of history. Seen through the eyes of revisionist studies and the poets’ investment in “personal myth”, the book establishes new points of entrance into works that allow us to explore the feminist, political, and poetical relevance of the work of Beat women.

More information: https://www.routledge.com/Beat-Myths-in-Literature-Revisionist-Strategies-in-Beat-Women/Encarnacion-Pinedo/p/book/9781032121314

He, Leo: The Life and Poetry of Lew Welch, Ewan Clark, Oregon State University Press (2023)

Largely remembered for his mysterious disappearance in May 1971, Lew Welch was an important voice of the Beat Generation and San Francisco Renaissance. He spoke of key issues that America was facing in the aftermath of World War II—from the rise of consumerism and complacent suburban sensibilities to the threat of environmental disaster. He championed American speech, idioms, and identities. He found inspiration in the words of Gertrude Stein and William Carlos Williams, in the philosophies of Senzaki and the Buddha, and in his myriad friendships with some of the most renowned and revered poets, musicians, and artists of the 1950s and 1960s. His search for authenticity in language and poetry was a small part of a far greater search to establish a clear sense of himself. He, Leo investigates Welch’s life and work in a chronological fashion, structured around Welch’s own notion of how three main aspects of his life—The Man, The Mountain, and The City—were interdependent. From his birth until his disappearance and presumed death, Welch’s life was often defined by problems, including a complex relationship with his mother, a long struggle with alcohol, and a fluctuating mental state. He was open and candid about everything, a fact that is evident in all aspects of his work. Each of the three main sections of He, Leo includes key poems, essays, and events—both personal and cultural—to help establish Welch’s importance as a prominent poet and figure during the San Francisco Renaissance. Despite his crushing self-criticism and his reputation as a “friend of,” he was a bona fide poet with a strong voice and message of his own. With this first full-length biography, Ewan Clark restores Lew Welch to his rightful place as an important member of a significant American literary and cultural movement.

Scenes of Bohemian Life by Henry Murger, translated by Robert Holton (Anthem Press, 2023)

A new translation of Henry Murger’s influential Scènes de la vie de bohème, First published in French in 1851, the book recounts the lives of a bohemian group of creative young people as they fall in and out of love, endure cold and hunger, enjoy drunken parties, see their friends suffer and die of poverty, and finally emerge as mature artists.


This book is a new translation of Henry Murger’s influential Scènes de la vie de bohème, first published in French in 1851. The book recounts the lives of a bohemian group of creative young people as they fall in and out of love, endure cold and hunger, enjoy
drunken parties, see their friends suffer and die of poverty, and finally emerge as mature artists. The book’s publication soon inspired many (mostly young) people to seek out a bohemian life in Paris and other cities around the world. Not only did it inspire
people at the time to change their lives, it also inspired Puccini’s beloved opera La Bohème (1896) and, a hundred years later, Jonathan Larson’s phenomenally successful Rent (1996). Few works of literature have had such a social impact. Bohemian cultures
and subcultures have been with us ever since and Murger’s book remains an engaging and satisfying work of literature.

More infos here: https://anthempress.com/media/pdf/9781839988806.pdf

Nina Zivancevic, SMRTi, Spuyten Duyvil, 2023

« Nina Zivancevic’s SMRTi belongs to a hybrid genre of fictional poetics cum anthropological essays. These essays are somewhat included in a vast genre of travelogues but these journals are more akin to the explorations of Margaret Mead and Levi-Strauss who believed in the anthropology of the Big Other not the strictly geographical descriptions of the lands we visit. Nina Zivancevic’s anthropological essay is above all a DIALOGUE where the author and her own culture dialogue with the cultures she visits. The author here does not take the privileged stance of domineering thinker who observes a new or an unknown culture with haut disdain. She allows the newly observed to subtly infl uence her. Thus her trip to India where Zivancevic dialogues with Henry Michaux who traveled and lived in India 80 years before Zivancevic and who left an indelible literary trace on the history of literature regarding Asia. »
David Graeber, Anthropologist, Political thinker, Activist

« Take a wild magical-mystical ride with Nina Z through the ancient, storied, and very real land of India. From airport to ashram and beyond, she applies her acute, wry observational eye to all she encounters—by turns hilarious and profound.
In the process, she delivers a whirlwind meditation on East versus West, with
observations on the subject by writers from Henri Michaux to Deleuze and Kristeva, via the Upanishads. …A lively, highly-informed interrogation of the structures and aesthetics of Eastern and Western thought—of thought itself—and the individual and collective belief systems these engender. »
Jessica Slote, writer, théâtrologue 

Farid Ghadami and Oliver Harris, Two Assassins: William Burroughs / Hassan Sabbah, Moloko Press, 2023


Two Assassins is a unique collaborative work, part detective story, part literary scholarship, part historical research, and part personal memoir that seeks to unravel a mystery: what the 11thcentury Persian Master of the Assassins, Hassan Sabbah, really meant for William Burroughs. Oliver Harris sheds light on the many untold backstories and dark textual secrets behind Burroughs’ invocations of Hassan Sabbah by retracing his own path of scholarship over the past 40 years. The result is a quest to discover the emotional as well as intellectual connections between the American writer and his most dedicated scholar. Farid Ghadami, on the other hand, tells the story of the real historical figure of Hassan Sabbah and his Ismaili successors, drawing on Persian and Arab sources to uncover some of the most important facts behind the legends. But he too follows a personal journey, tracing the intersection of William Burroughs and Hassan Sabbah back to his own roots as a descendent of the peoples of Alamout, his citadel in northern Iran. Tracking back and forth between individual and cultural memory, fact and fantasy, Two Assassins brings to life the fascinating story of an unlikely and extraordinary relationship.

More infos here: http://molokoplusrecords.de/finder.php?folder=Print&content=229

Erik Mortenson and Tony Trigilio, The Beats and the Academy: A Renegotiation, Clemson University Press, 2023

The Beats and the Academy marks the first sustained effort to train a scholarly eye on the dynamics of the relationship between Beat writers and the academic institutions in which they taught. Rather than assuming the relationship between Beat writers and institutions of higher education was only hostile, The Beats and the Academy begins with the premise that influence between the two flows in both directions. Beat writers’ suspicion of established institutions was a significant aspect of their postwar countercultural allure. Their anti-establishment aesthetic and countercultural stance led Beat writers to be critical of postwar academic institutions that tended to dismiss them as a passing social phenomenon. Even today, Beat writing still meets resistance in an academy that questions the relevance of their writing and ideas. But this picture, like any generalization, is far too easy. The Beat relationship to the academy is one of negotiation, rather than negation. Many Beats strove for academic recognition, and quite a few received it. And despite hostility to their work both in the postwar era and today, Beat works have made it onto syllabi, into conference presentations, journal articles, and monographs. The Beats and the Academy deepens our understanding of this relationship by emphasizing how institutional friction between the Beats and institutions of higher education has shaped our understanding of Beat Generation literature and culture—and what this relationship between Beat writers and the academy might suggest about their legacy for future scholars.

Link to the publisher’s website: https://libraries.clemson.edu/press/books/the-beats-and-the-academy/

Elise Cowen: Dejadme salir, dejadme entrar (Let me out, let me in), Torremozas, 2023

ELISE COWEN (New York, 1933-1962) was the poétesse maudite of the Beat Generation. She was eclipsed by the myth of the suicidal poet and the stigmatization of female madness. The narrative of her life gravitates around her relationship with Allen Ginsberg and her work was destroyed by her family. Only a notebook with ninety-one poems survived, to which we did not have access until 2014 with the edition of her poetry by Tony Trigilio. To make justice to her identity as a writer, to her legacy and contribution to the movement she belonged to, it is fundamental to read and know her poetry.
Her work is singular due to her frank approach to mental health and her heterogenous experimentation with poetic styles and literary influences. Madness, reflection, oppression and fear vertebrate Dejadme salir, dejadme entrar (Let me out, Let me in); but also love (not only romantic and erotic, but the one growing from compassion and wonder), a spiritual poetic vision, and the sparkle and haven of the mundane and domestic. When we read her work, we find humor, irony, rhythmic ballads, surreal images, and, above all, the splendor of the poetic act. With this first study and translation of Elise Cowen into Spanish by Isabel Castelao-Gómez (which includes an introductory critical study and detailed notes to the poems), we would like to highlight her legacy within the Beat generation and contribute to the attention she deserves as a writer.

Link to the publisher’s website: https://www.torremozas.com/Elise-Cowen

Max Reeves: I Remember a White Cat in Tangier, Entropy Press, 2023

Photography, Bohemia, Cats, Tangier.

A look at the Beatnik resonance of Moroccan City Tangier, the ‘Interzone’ of William S. Burroughs with Literary sites, reportage photography and Cats.

“Max Reeves’ photo-essay is an ‘Interzone Revisited’ for 21C bohemians. It is colourfully accepting of the disappointments of postcolonialism,  the rampancy of gentrification, the evanescence of genius (almost without  trace) and the homogeneity of neoliberalism. Why? Because the Tangier chapter of globalism’s cesspit overflows with lost ghosts, sacred sites, pauperised saints, and totemic feral cats, liberated from their abysm  by the click of a button and liberating the eye of the beholder with poetry.”   Niall McDevitt

To buy this book: https://www.entropypress.co.uk/books/p/i-remember-a-white-cat-in-tangier

Bill Morgan: Thomas Merton, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and the Protection of All Beings, Beatdom, 2022

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet and Beat publisher, could hardly seem more different from Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, yet the two men not only respected one another but were friends and collaborators over a period of a decade until Merton’s untimely death.
In this volume, Bill Morgan examines their friendship and shares their correspondence for the first time. He looks into the poetic projects they pursued and details their final meeting, shortly before Merton’s passing, shedding new light on two of the most important writers of the 20th century.

Publisher’s website: https://www.beatdom.com/thomas-merton-lawrence-ferlinghetti-and-the-protection-of-all-beings/

David Calonne: The Beats in Mexico, Rutgers University Press, 2022

Mexico features prominently in the literature and personal legends of the Beat writers, from its depiction as an extension of the American frontier in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road to its role as a refuge for writers with criminal pasts like William S. Burroughs. Yet the story of Beat literature and Mexico takes us beyond the movement’s superstars to consider the important roles played by lesser-known female Beat writers. 
 
The first book-length study of why the Beats were so fascinated by Mexico and how they represented its culture in their work, this volume examines such canonical figures as Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Lamantia, McClure, and Ferlinghetti. It also devotes individual chapters to women such as Margaret Randall, Bonnie Bremser, and Joanne Kyger, who each made Mexico a central setting of their work and interrogated the misogyny they encountered in both American and Mexican culture. 
 
The Beats in Mexico not only considers individual Beat writers, but also places them within a larger history of countercultural figures, from D.H. Lawrence to Antonin Artaud to Jim Morrison, who mythologized Mexico as the land of the Aztecs and Maya, where shamanism and psychotropic drugs could take you on a trip far beyond the limits of the American imagination.

Link to buy the book: https://www.amazon.com/Beats-Mexico-David-Stephen-Calonne/dp/1978828721/ref=sr_1_1?qid=1650726432&refinements=p_27%3ADavid+Stephen+Calonne&s=books&sr=1-1.

A. Robert Lee and Douglas Field (ed.): Harold Norse: Poet Maverick, Gay Laureate, Clemson University Press, 2022

Who was Harold Norse? Despite publishing over a dozen volumes of poetry between the early 1950s and the new millennium, until now, the Brooklyn-born Norse has been relegated to a footnote in accounts of twentieth century literary history. Harold Norse: Poet Maverick, Gay Laureate is the first collection of essays devoted to this enigmatic poet and visual artist. As this volume explores, Norse, who developed his craft while living in Europe during the 1950s and 1960s, is an important figure in the development of mid-twentieth century poetics. During the 1950s and 1960s, Norse was a notable figure in the plethora of little poetry magazines published in the USA and Europe through to skirmishes with respectability and acceptance (Penguin and City Lights). Norse is a key figure in the development of the cut-up process made famous by his friend, William S. Burroughs. His correspondence with his mentor, the poet William Carlos Williams, captures his poetic shifts from formalism to the development of his Brooklyn idiom, while his gripping autobiography, Memoirs of a Bastard Angel, documents his transatlantic networks of writers and artists, among them James Baldwin, Allen Ginsberg, and Charles Bukowski. And after returning to the US in the late 1960s, Norse emerged as leading figure in Gay Liberation poetry.

Link to buy: https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/books/isbn/9781638040163/

Matt Theado (ed.):The Beats, Black Mountain, and New Modes in American Poetry, Clemson University Press, 2022

The Beats, Black Mountain, and New Modes of American Poetry explores correspondences amongst the Black Mountain and Beat Generation writers, two of most well-known and influential groups of poets in the 1950s. The division of writers as Beat or Black Mountain has hindered our understanding of the ways that these poets developed from mutual influences, benefitted from direct relations, and overlapped their boundaries. This collection of academic essays refines and adds context to Beat Studies and Black Mountain Studies by investigating the groups’ intersections and undercurrents. One goal of the book is to deconstruct the Beat and Black Mountain labels in order to reveal the shifting and fluid relationships among the individual poets who developed a revolutionary poetics in the 1950s and beyond. Taken together, these essays clarify the radical experimentation with poetics undertaken by these poets.

Link to buy: https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/books/isbn/9781949979930/

Nancy Grace (ed.):The Beats: A Teaching Companion, Clemson University Press, 2022

This volume addresses integrating into the classroom Beat authors, texts, and themes associated with Beat writing, generally dated from the early 1950s to 1964-65, when the major social justice movements in the United States began to tear apart the fabric of post war containment culture and Hippie counterculture became a dominant movement. The book provides a robust foundation for discussions of the continued relevance of Beat literature in educational settings.

Link to buy: https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/books/isbn/9781949979954/

!! FRENCH BOOK !!

Jean-François Duval: LuAnne sur la route avec Neal Cassady et Jack Kerouac, Gallimard, 2022

Jean-François Duval‘s new book is out! Please find the summary below (in French). You can find more details on the publisher’s website: clik here.
This new book will make you relive On the road through LuAnne’s eyes.

Le nouveau livre de Jean-François Duval vient de paraître chez Gallimard. Pour plus de renseignements, rendez-vous sur le site de l’éditeur en cliquant ici.

“La parole revient enfin à LuAnne Henderson, la « Marylou » de Sur la route, l’un des plus attachants personnages du livre culte de Kerouac. Jeune épouse de Neal Cassady, éphémère amante de Kerouac, elle est amenée sous la plume de Jean-François Duval à se souvenir de ses dix-sept ans. Egérie juvénile dans un univers dont on n’a longtemps retenu que les figures masculines (Ginsberg, Burroughs et bien d’autres), elle pose un regard nouveau, frais et spontané sur ces « vivants de l’instant », qu’elle est la seule femme à avoir accompagnés sur la route, au cœur de l’aventure beat.
On se demande avec elle si la vieille Hudson 49 s’arrêtera jamais de rouler. On fonce. Où ? Ailleurs, loin, toujours plus loin. En quête d’un absolu ? Qu’importe, avec eux tous, c’est dans une odyssée vagabonde à travers l’Amérique que le lecteur est emporté. Les Rocheuses, la baie de Frisco, New York, la Louisiane sont des boussoles qui servent à se perdre plus qu’à se trouver.
Dans cette célébration inassouvie de la vie, Neal Cassady, Jack Kerouac et LuAnne redeviennent les figures légendaires d’une époque qui n’est plus mais qui a gardé sa puissance poétique intacte.”

Also, you can find some articles from French newspapers below.

Retrouvez également un entretien de entre Jean-François Duval et Kevin Ring dans le 103e numéro de la revue Beat Scene.

Polina Mackay: Beat Feminisms; Aesthetics, Literature, Gender, Activism, Routledge 2021

This is the first book-length study to read women of the Beat Generation as feminist writers. The book focuses on one author from each of the three generations that comprise the groups of female writers associated with the Beats – Diane di Prima, ruth weiss and Anne Waldman – as well as on experimental and multimedia artists, such as Laurie Anderson and Kathy Acker, who have not been read through the prism of Beat feminism before. This book argues that these writers’ feminism evolved over time but persistently focussed on intertextuality, transformation, revisionism, gender,  interventionist poetics and activism. It demonstrates how these Beat feminisms counteract the ways in which women have been undermined, possessed or silenced.

Estíbaliz Encarnación-Pinedo and Thomas Antonic (ed.): ruth weiss; Beat poetry, jazz, art

ruth weiss, born in Berlin in 1928 to Austrian-Jewish parents, arrived in San Francisco in 1952 after hitchhiking through the United States. Crowned years later as the “Goddess of the Beat Generation” by San Francisco Chronicle critic Herb Caen, weiss worked for almost seven decades with a plurality of artistic forms. Despite her extensive poetry career and very active participation in the West Coast buzzing artistic community since the early 1950s, weiss has remained an essentially overlooked figure in poetry history. This neglect might be representative of the overshadowing of female artists within the Beat Generation as “a marginalized group within an always already marginalized bohemia” (Johnson, 2004: 5).

ruth weiss: Beat Poetry, Jazz, Art taps directly into this lacuna by proving the first close study on one of the most prolific members of the so-called Beat Generation. Offering diverse and comprehensive points of entrance into weiss’s oeuvre, the essays in this volume adopt a multidisciplinary approach that attests to the cross-pollination between art forms in postwar counterculture. Divided into two sections—”Beyond Poetry” and “Poetry, Jazz & Art”—the volume also includes poems as well as shorter, non-academic contributions, previously unpublished archival material and a complete bibliography on ruth weiss. Bringing together scholars, academics, and artists from around the world, this volume represents a timely and much-needed response to the increasing interest in weiss’ work in the last decades.

Click here to buy: https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110694550/html

Guy Stevenson: Anti-Humanism in Counterculture

This book offers a radical new reading of the 1950s and 60s American literary counterculture. Associated nostalgically with freedom of expression, romanticism, humanist ideals and progressive politics, the period was steeped too in opposite ideas – ideas that doubted human perfectibility, spurned the majority for a spiritually elect few, and had their roots in earlier politically reactionary avant-gardes. Through case studies of icons in the counterculture – the controversial sexual revolutionary Henry Miller, Beat Generation writers Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs and self-proclaimed ‘philosopher of hip’, Norman Mailer – Guy Stevenson explores a set of paradoxes at its centre: between romantic optimism and modernist pessimism; between brutal rhetoric and emancipatory desires; and between social egalitarianism and spiritual elitism. Such paradoxes, Stevenson argues, help explain the cultural and political worlds these writers shaped – in their time and beyond.

Clémentine Hougue: William S. Burroughs SF machine

Venusian invaders, interplanetary conspiracies, time travel, omnipresent surveillance systems and pirate rebellions: the work of William S. Burroughs is deeply stamped by the imaginary of science fiction, a genre which he read enthusiastically. In this study, Clémentine Hougue, Doctor of Comparative Literature, sheds new light on how the author of Naked Lunch combines themes of the literary genre with avant-garde experimental methods, to create a “textual machine” conceived as a counter-attack against the dominance of the image, the proliferation of viral information and systems of control.

Des envahisseurs vénusiens, des complots interplanétaires, des voyages dans le temps, des organes de surveillance omniprésents et des insurrections pirates : l’œuvre de William S. Burroughs est profondément marquée par l’imaginaire de la science-fiction, genre dont il était un lecteur enthousiaste. Dans cet essai, Clémentine Hougue, docteure en littérature comparée, apporte un éclairage inédit
sur la manière dont l’auteur du Festin nu combine les thèmes de la littérature de genre et les expérimentations d’avant-garde, générant une «machine textuelle» conçue comme une contre-offensive à la prééminence des images, à la prolifération virale de l’information et aux systèmes de contrôle.

Pour lire le communiqué de presse, cliquez-ici

To read more about the book, click here.

Three new cut-up books from Moloko Print, appearing on the 60th anniversary of the original cut-up publications.

The Exterminator Redux

(Moloko: Schönebeck)

Edited and with an Introduction by Oliver Harris

From the Introduction:

“It is a well-known tiresome fact, it is a notoriously dull and long-winded fact—to borrow a line from Naked Lunch—that anyone who mentions The Exterminator has to point out that everyone else who mentions it gets the title wrong, confusing the experimental cut-up pamphlet from 1960 co-authored by Burroughs and Gysin with a collection of Burroughs’ relatively conventional short fiction published in 1973 called Exterminator! The confusion proves how easy it is for careless critics and copyeditors to muddle up little-known books with similar-sounding titles, but this case of mistaken identity also applies to the text as a whole. The Exterminator is far more interesting than just an abandoned early experiment or a transitional work that shows how Burroughs got from Naked Lunch to The Soft Machine. If you want to know how to get from the Duke of Buckingham to Arnold Schwarzenegger, or from the Surrealists to the Sex Pistols, or from the New York Herald Tribune to some of Burroughs’ most potent phrases, you need to be reading the right Exterminator.”

Click here to buy :  https://www.sea-urchin.net/books/moloko-print/

Minutes to Go Redux


(Moloko: Schönebeck)

Edited and with an Introduction by Oliver Harris

From the Introduction:

“Cut-Up Ground Zero was Paris in April 1960 when Minutes to Go appeared with a wraparound band that declared “un règlement de comptes avec la Littérature.” The meaning translates simply enough: “a settling of scores with Literature.” But the message that launched the cut-up project is a cryptic puzzle with a secret history, like Minutes to Go itself, so that solving it offers a clue to the obscure readability of the text and to backstories that have remained in the dark for sixty years.

            While the pamphlet has long been out of print, the stories about it recycled in biographies and cultural histories of the Beat Generation have made Minutes to Go deceptively familiar; even the wraparound band gets a regular mention, although it was only fitted to some of the original thousand copies and not a part of the 1968 American reprint. Everyone knows what happened at the Beat Hotel in autumn 1959 when Minutes to Go was thrown together after the chance discovery Brion Gysin made with his Stanley knife, and William Burroughs, Gregory Corso and Sinclair Beiles joined in with their scissors—those “hectic, portentous” days, as Burroughs would call them with nostalgia, when “everything had meaning.” But the standard history is just cut-up mythology. Piecing together a clear story of its creation and refusing to take the text at face value, we discover not only what didn’t make the cut and is hidden in the archives, but also what’s been hiding in plain sight—which in the case of the wraparound band is the mystery of why an English-language pamphlet written by four English-language authors for an English-language readership should announce itself in words of French.”

Click here to buy :  https://www.sea-urchin.net/books/moloko-print/

BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS


(Moloko: Schönebeck)

Edited and with an Introduction by Oliver Harris

From the Introduction:

“A unique lost manuscript pieced together from the archives, BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS weaponises the methods of radical art for acts of anarchic insurrection against the global elites and alien powers that rule our planet. Just as fresh and ferocious as when it was written in 1960, it reveals Burroughs the polemicist and prophet at his most revolutionary, the cut-up guerrilla tactician and man of ideas at his most incendiary, a surprise to even dedicated followers and a spectacular introduction for new readers. But don’t be misled by the publicity puff and scholarly spin, for this isn’t a minor masterpiece recovered from the past to celebrate or study; it’s something far more ambivalent and important. This is the Real Thing we thought we always wanted, Burroughs absolutely unbound, radical in tooth and claw—which forces us to wonder: is this what we wanted after all?

BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS mirrors back the hypocrisy of our desire, because we don’t want Burroughs redacted or recuperated into just another canonical figure, an airbrushed icon of iconoclasm: we want our Burroughs uncompromisingly corrosive and experimentally far out, beyond the pale of life and literature—but only up to a certain point. BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS exceeds that point and presses uncertainty to the limit. It’s hard to say whether what we’re reading is blistering or boring, mesmerising or moronic, a work of literature or ranting naked polemic, a hex or a hoax, while it seems as reactionary as it is revolutionary, as stupidly repetitive as anything by Gertrude Stein, as virulently anti-Semitic as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and as psychotic as Robert De Niro’s vigilante killer in Taxi Driver, talking to himself in the mirror with guns up his sleeves. Even Burroughs quickly had second thoughts, at the time conceding it was “just as well” that it wasn’t published, and readers sixty years later might at first sight agree that it would have been better off left in bits and pieces in the archival vaults.”

Click here to buy :  https://www.sea-urchin.net/books/moloko-print/

A new edition of Burroughs’ long-out-of-print fourth cut-up novel.


Dead Fingers Talk: The Restored Text

(London: Alma Books)


Edited and with an Introduction by Oliver Harris

“A prophetic work of haunting power and a unique landmark in cultural history, Dead Fingers Talk is nevertheless a book gone missing in the William Burroughs oeuvre. For half a century, it has been the phantom of a text, existing more as a title flickering in and out of footnotes than as a work that anybody actually read. To date, the only people who’ve seen any value in it are the rare-book collectors who esteem the original jacket design (“the coolest first-edition hardcover”) and a short-lived 1970s British punk band that borrowed the catchy title for reasons just as superficial (“We liked the sound of it… a cool name”). By ignoring Dead Fingers Talk completely, the consensus of the critics is that there’s simply nothing to say for or about it, and has been ever since the reviewers made a damning case against the book on its publication in November 1963, when even the least hostile review asked the question, “Why read Dead Fingers Talk?” So, this cold-case review has to begin by contesting the seemingly cut-and-dried verdict that these fingers don’t talk.”

R. Crumb: Literature, Autobiography, and the Quest for Self

Robert Crumb (b. 1943) read widely and deeply a long roster of authors including Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Dickens, J. D. Salinger, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg, as well as religious classics including biblical, Buddhist, Hindu, and Gnostic texts. Crumb’s genius, according to author David Stephen Calonne, lies in his ability to absorb a variety of literary, artistic, and spiritual traditions and incorporate them within an original, American mode of discourse that seeks to reveal his personal search for the meaning of life.

R. Crumb: Literature, Autobiography, and the Quest for Self contains six chapters that chart Crumb’s intellectual trajectory and explore the recurring philosophical themes that permeate his depictions of literary and biographical works and the ways he responds to them through innovative, dazzling compositional techniques.

Calonne explores the ways Crumb develops concepts of solitude, despair, desire, and conflict as aspects of the quest for self in his engagement with the book of Genesis and works by Franz Kafka, Jean-Paul Sartre, the Beats, Charles Bukowski, and Philip K. Dick, as well as Crumb’s illustrations of biographies of musicians Jelly Roll Morton and Charley Patton. Calonne demonstrates how Crumb’s love for literature led him to attempt an extremely faithful rendering of the texts he admired while at the same time highlighting for his readers the particular hidden philosophical meanings he found most significant in his own autobiographical quest for identity and his authentic self.

In the Rebel Cafe, Interviews with Ed Sanders. Edited by Jennie Skerl (Clemson University Press, 2020)

A collection of interviews with Ed Sanders, in which he records his transition as a poet from lyric to historical narrative to epic, the development of his fiction and journalism, the creation and revival of the Fugs (his satirical folk rock band), his role in the art and counter-culture of the 1960s, his subsequent historical assessment of the era, and his continuing social commitments

KEY FEATURES:

• Interviews have been selected representing each decade of Sanders’s career from the 1960s up to the present, constituting a career biography of Sanders as a writer, musician, and activist.
• Includes a critical introduction to Sanders’s life and work, a chronology of Sanders’s career, a bibliography of his publications, and a discography of Fugs and Sanders albums

30% discount online
• USA ADISTA5 http://www.global.oup.com/academic
• UK & RoW LUP30 http://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk

You can download the complete description here:

in-the-rebel-cafe-1Télécharger

Neal Cassady, The Joan Anderson Letter (Eyewear Publishing, 2020)

A letter from Neal Cassady to his best friend and travelling companion Jack (On the Road) Kerouac. Kerouac received the letter from Cassady in 1950 and later told the Paris Review that it had inspired ‘On the Road’ along with his new literary style; referring to it as ‘thegreatest piece of writing I ever saw’. The energy of Cassady’s fast-paced, free-flowing, confessional prose pulsates through the 15,000 word missive; bringing gloriously to life the personality of one of the most high profile figures in literary, and Beat movement, history.

This incredibly illusive artefact, which describes in explicit detail his relationship with Joan Anderson (‘a perfect beauty of loveliness that I forgot everything else’), had been missing for 60 years when it was discovered in an attic in Oakland, USA, in 2011. Legal machinations over its ownership ensued and it has not been published in its entirety…until now.

This much-anticipated letter is now reproduced in full, with an introduction by Beat scholar Professor A. Robert Lee. This jewel of Beat history also includes a range of photographs of the writers and a rare sepia drawing of Neal by his former wife, writer and artist Carolyn Cassady.

Thomas Antonic, Amongst Nazis: William S. Burroughs in Vienna 1936/37 (Moloko, 2020)

His mid-1930s visit to Vienna has always seemed a brief but colourful episode in Burroughs’ biography, but Antonic’s study has turned it into a transformative chapter in the writer’s life. Based on meticulous and extensive historical research, Amongst Nazis not only gives the first detailed and accurate account of Burroughs’ experience there but offers new insights into its impact on his literary life, including the reasons why the city where Burroughs studied medicine was the birthplace of his most notorious character, Dr. Benway.

Oliver Harris

MORE INFO :

This is a bilingual English and German edition. and it contains 27 image plates which feature never seen before photographs (including a 23 year-old Burroughs, and his first wife Ilse Herzfeld Klapper) and other, previously unpublished documents.

It can be ordered directly from the publisher, online at https://www.sea-urchin.net/ and from other platforms, and soon also in bookstores. ISBN 978-3-943603-84-2

David Calonne, Diane di Prima: Visionary Poetics and the Hidden Religions, (Bloomsbury, 2020)

Diane di Prima: Visionary Poetics and the Hidden Religions reveals how central di Prima was in the discovery, articulation and dissemination of the major themes of the Beat and hippie countercultures from the fifties to the present.

Di Prima (1934–) was at the center of literary, artistic, and musical culture in New York City. She also was at the energetic fulcrum of the Beat movement and, with Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka), edited The Floating Bear (1961-69), a central publication of the period to which William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson, and Frank O’Hara contributed. Di Prima was also a pioneer in her challenges to conventional assumptions regarding love, sexuality, marriage, and the role of women.

David Stephen Calonne charts the life work of di Prima through close readings of her poetry, prose, and autobiographical writings, exploring her thorough immersion in world spiritual traditions and how these studies informed both the form and content of her oeuvre. Di Prima’s engagement in what she would call “the hidden religions” can be divided into several phases: her years at Swarthmore College and in New York; her move to San Francisco and immersion in Zen; her researches into the I Ching, Paracelsus, John Dee, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, alchemy, Tarot, and Kabbalah of the mid-sixties; and her later interest in Tibetan Buddhism. Diane di Prima: Visionary Poetics and the Hidden Religions is the first monograph devoted to a writer of genius whose prolific work is notable for its stylistic variety, wit and humor, struggle for social justice, and philosophical depth.

David Calonne is also the author of The Spiritual Imagination of the Beats (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

Ira Cohen, Into the Mylar Chamber, edited by Allan Graubard, (Fulgur Press, 2019)

This large-format, exquisitely illustrated hardback is a stunning tribute to the extraordinary photographic experiments of poet Ira Cohen, who in the late 1960s built a Mylar Chamber in New York and for the next three years took pictures of a variety of friends—mostly unknown, but including artists and writers from William Burroughs to Angus MacLise, Alejandro Jodorowsky to Bill Levy—as they mutated in the distorting molten mirror of the silver plastic sheets. The alchemical-psychedelic effect cannot be put into words, although the EBSN’s own Ian MacFadyen comes close in a typically dazzling end erudite essay that supplements contributions by Allan Graubard, Thurston Moore, Ira Landgarten, Alice Farley and Timothy Baum. Not a cheap book but absolutely priceless.

Let the Mice in -Brion Gysin

Ralf Friel’s Moloko Plus press has published a facsimile of the original 1973 edition of Brion Gysin’s Let the Mice in and extended it with a foreword by EBSN member Douglas Field and extra photos of Gysin. First published by Dick Higgins’s Something Else Press in 1973, contributor Jan Herman writes that the book brings together texts and photographs from the 1960s to document the use of cut-ups as a writing technique. Let the Mice in contains essays, cut-ups, photos, poems and works by Gysin and others that not only document cut-up literary history but shine light on the radical, pseudo-scientific and mystical influences that are the ground of Gysin’s art.

Bomb Culture -Jeff Nuttall

Jeff Nuttall’s Bomb Culture (1968), like his magazine project My Own Mag (to which William Burroughs, in cut-up mode, was a key contributor) achieved cult status as a vital, radical exploration of 1960s counterculture. Nuttall’s reflective post-60s manifesto explores the radicalism of the 60s art, music, and protest movements.

Nuttall felt that atomic apocalypse was ubiquitous within high and low cultures, invading all cultural output, much as the mechanized death of The Great War stimulated Dadaism.

  • Three Books from A. Robert Lee

RH International Beat Literature_2nd Proof-2-1 (1)EBSN member, poet and indomitable veteran American Studies scholar A. Robert Lee is certainly not letting his foot off the gas. First up is his edited volume The Routledge Handbook of International Beat Literature which came out late in 2018 (reviewed here). Consisting of a detailed exploration of transnational Beat genealogies and Beat inflected writing from beyond the borders of the United States, its 23 essays are throughly researched and take Beat Studies in new and fruitful directions.

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Lee’s most recent book of scholarship, The Beats: Authorships, Legacies (2019), continues where the Handbook left off; by resolutely and with some style re-assessing the ‘Beat Generation” writers, while expanding the field beyond the commonly cited big three.  While essentially another overview and introduction to the movement, The Beats: Authorships, Legacies attempts to give the Beat Generation greater legitimacy as a literary movement, and contains some insightful scholarship and close reading along the way. (You can read a review here).WriterDirectory-1 (1)

The third text unleashed by Lee is his inventive collection of vignettes Writer Directory: A Book of Encounters (2019). Described as “a species of hybrid text, part miniature literary biographies, part figuration and metaphor”, it successfully circumnavigates the boundaries between scholarship and creativity; and is clearly influenced by, and references, the Beats (including his friendship with Anne Waldman).

  • Blade Runner: A Movie, William S. Burroughs

blade runner1Tangerine Press published the 40th anniversary edition of William S. Burroughs’ Blade Runner: A Movie. In the mid-1970s, William Burroughs returned to New York after a stint as writer-in-exile in London, a city marred by strikes, blackouts and social unease. But the Big Apple wasn’t in too good a shape either… One of the first projects he started working on was a film treatment for an obscure, pulp sci-fi novel he had recently stumbled across. As time went on, the prose began to take on a life of its own, morphing into the novella (of sorts)… Blade Runner: A Movie is about the coming medical-care crisis, a mutated virus and right-wing politics… Enter the world of Billy Gimp, Big Pharma conspiracies, corrupt government officials, backstreet doctors, Accelerated Cancer… This book is classic Burroughs in distilled form. Forty years on from its first publication, this new edition includes a specially commissioned introduction by Burroughs scholar Oliver Harris.

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Gerard Malanga‘s photo of the author adorns the paperback front cover. It is also bound into the 100-copy numbered edition.


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George Mattingly‘s filmstrip layout and design from the original 1979 edition has been recreated with his blessing

  • Female Beatness by Isabel Castelao-Gómez and Natalia Carbajosa Palmero

159 Female Beatness - publicidad-cubiertaThis study constitutes the first critical approach, in the Spanish-speaking academic world, on the Beat Generation female poets and artists who, together with the well-known male members of the group (Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs) revolutionized the US urban literary scene during the 1950s, thus anticipating the 60s and 70s worldwide change of mentality. Female Beatness locates the women who took part in the effervescence of the exceptionally creative Beat time in the literary canon and its historical path; women who, moreover, with their lives and their works broke the barriers of the subsidiary roles for which they had been raised. Within a wide approach that joins the socio-historical context, gender theories and textual analysis, this book focuses on the poets Elise Cowen, Diane di Prima, ruth weiss and Denise Levertov, thereby exploring all the possible, diverse ways of becoming a Beat… woman. Nowadays, more than half a century later, their influence and reputation are still in full force.

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Este estudio constituye el primer acercamiento crítico, en el mundo académico hispano, a las poetas y artistas de la generación Beat que, junto con los componentes masculinos bien conocidos del grupo (Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs) revolucionaron la escena literaria urbana en la década de los cincuenta en los Estados Unidos, adelantándose así al cambio de mentalidad que colonizó el mundo en los sesenta y los setenta. Female Beatness ubica en el canon lite

rario y el devenir histórico a las mujeres que participaron de la efervescencia del excepcional momento creativo Beat y rompieron las barreras, con sus vivencias y sus obras, del papel subsidiario para el que a priori habían sido educadas. Dentro de un enfoque amplio que aúna contexto socio-histórico, teorías de género y análisis textual, el libro pone en el punto de mira a las poetas Elise Cowen, Diane di Prima, ruth weiss y Denise Levertov, explorando de este modo todas las formas posibles, muy

diferentes entre sí, de ser Beat… en femenino. Hoy día, más de medio siglo después, su influencia y predicamento siguen absolutamente vigentes.

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Presentation of “Female Beatness“

Sat, Sep 21, 2019

Calle de la Palma, 21, 28004 Madrid
19:45

Arrebato Books, 19:45

  • Nicosia on Kerouac: The Last Quarter Century

Gerald Nicosia’s new book is on its way and will be released in October (2019). In the meantime, you can read his interview with Kurt Hemmer by clicking this link.

nicosia book

“William S. Burroughs Cutting Up the Century is the definitive book on Burroughs’ overarching cut-up project and its relevance to the American twentieth century. Burroughs’s Nova Trilogy (The Soft Machine, Nova Express, and The Ticket That Exploded) remains the best-known of his textual cut-up creations, but he committed more than a decade of his life to searching out multimedia for use in works of collage. By cutting up, folding in, and splicing together newspapers, magazines, letters, book reviews, classical literature, audio recordings, photographs, and films, Burroughs created an eclectic and wide-ranging countercultural archive. This collection includes previously unpublished work by Burroughs such as cut-ups of work written by his son, cut-ups of critical responses to his own work, collages on the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, excerpts from his dream journals, and some of the few diary entries that Burroughs wrote about his wife, Joan.

William S. Burroughs Cutting Up the Century also features original essays, interviews, and discussions by established Burroughs scholars, respected artists, and people who encountered Burroughs. The essays consider Burroughs from a range of starting points—literary studies, media studies, popular culture, gender studies, post-colonialism, history, and geography. Ultimately, the collection situates Burroughs as a central artist and thinker of his time and considers his insights on political and social problems that have become even more dire in ours.”

Ouvrage de référence, William S. Burroughs Cutting Up the Century offre un regard d’une rare pertinence sur le XXe siècle américain et sur la technique du cut-up de Burroughs. Si la Nova Trilogy de Burroughs (composée de La Machine molle, Nova Express et Le Tocket qui explosa) demeure son œuvre de cut-up la plus connue, l’auteur a toutefois consacré plus de dix ans  à la collecte de contenus variés qu’il destinait à ses travaux de collage. En découpant, assemblant et collant des extraits de journaux, de magazines, de lettres, de critiques de livres, de littérature classique, d’enregistrements sonores, de photographies et de films, Burroughs a créé une véritable somme d’archives contre-culturelle éclectique et diversifiée. Cette compilation présentée ici par Joan Hawkins et Alex Wermer-Colan comprend ainsi des travaux inédits de Burroughs, tels que des cut-ups composés d’écrits de son fils, de critiques sur son travail, des collages consacrés à la guerre du Vietnam et au scandale du Watergate, d’extraits de son journal de rêves et quelques pages de son journal consacrées à sa femme, Joan.

William S. Burroughs Cutting Up the Century propose également des essais inédits, des interviews et des conversations menées avec des chercheurs reconnus et spécialistes de Burroughs, des artistes renommés et d’autres personnes qui côtoyèrent Burroughs. Les études et essais présents dans cet ouvrage abordent Burroughs par le biais de différents prismes tels que les études littéraire, les études des médias, la culture populaire, les études de genre, le post-colonialisme, l’histoire et la géographie. Enfin, ces textes et réflexions situent Burroughs en tant qu’artiste et penseur de son temps et de sa génération, et analyse ses prises de positions sur des problèmes politiques et sociaux qui se sont aujourd’hui amplifiés.

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Please find the table of contents by clicking the link below:

Retrouvez la table des matières en cliquant sur le lien ci-dessous:

Table of Contents_Cutting Up the Century

  • L’Esprit Créateur

We’re delighted to announce the publication of “French and Beat Literatures: A History of Mutual Appropriation, Reception, and Translation,” a special issue of the bilingual journal L’Esprit Créateur.

Nous sommes heureux de vous annoncer la parution d’un numéro spécial de la revue bilingue L’Esprit Créateur, intitulé « French and Beat Literatures: A History of Mutual Appropriation, Reception, and Translation ».

couv2Most of the special issue developed out of papers given at the 2017 EBSN conference in Paris, and includes essays by Maarten van Gageldonk, Oliver Harris, James Horton, Olivier Penot-Lacassagne, Andrew Hussey, Véronique Lane, Franca Bellarsi, Susan Pinette, Jason Earle and Hassan Melehy. “French and Beat Literatures” also includes book reviews by Katharine Streip, Annie de Saussure, Alex Wermer-Colan and Guy Stevenson.

Abstracts–English

Cette édition est en grande partie constituée des textes des conférences présentées lors de la conférence de l’EBSN de 2017 qui s’est tenue à Paris. Sont donc inclus des essais de Maarten van Gageldonk, Oliver Harris, James Horton, Olivier Penot-Lacassagne, Andrew Hussey, Véronique Lane, Franca Bellarsi, Susan Pinette, Jason Earle et Hassan Melehy. Ce numéro comprend également des critiques de livres par Katharine Streip, Annie de Saussure, Alex Wermer-Colan et Guy Stevenson.

Abstracts–Français

“The book is the first monograph which examines the correspondences between the  oeuvre of Jack Kerouac and the thought of Jacques Lacan, the two apparently  incompatible worlds which prove to be complementary when taking a closer look. The study demonstrates a number of points. Firstly, with Jacques Lacan as a silent partner, it helps to better understand why psychoanalysis won Kerouac’s enmity in the mid-1950s. It also delves into Lacan’s reflections on spontaneous free-association to prove their convergence with Beats’ literary tactics. In its final part, by employing Lacanian theory, the book offers an extensive insight into Kerouac’s oeuvre to excavate the problematic status of the father figure, a crucial matter not yet given a rigorous critical attention.”

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Dans ce livre, Bruno Geneste allie citations de Kerouac et réflexions personnelles. « C’est une conversation informelle pour montrer les différents aspects de ce que symbolisait la route pour Kerouac », explique-t-il. Cet ouvrage au ton lyrique et poétique a été écrit en seulement trois semaines, pour respecter l’esprit et le procédé d’écriture automatique de Kerouac.

Pour en savoir plus sur l’éditeur : https://edmontagnesnoires.weebly.com/

In this book, Bruno Geneste uses quotes from Kerouac and personal reflections. “It’s an informal conversation to show the different aspects of what the road symbolized to Kerouac, “he explains. This lyric and poetic book has been written in just three weeks, to respect the spirit and Kerouac’s automatic writing process.

To find out more about the publisher: https://edmontagnesnoires.weebly.com/

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Les Éditions des Lisières viennent de faire paraître (novembre 2018) un nouvel ouvrage intitulé Jack Kerouac et le haïku – Itinéraire dans l’errance. Bertrand Agostini (traducteur du Livre des haïkus, éd. La Table Ronde) s’associe à Christiane Pajotin pour nous faire découvrir une nouvelle facette de Kerouac. Cette étude est une réédition revue et augmentée d’une édition épuisée de 1998 et est accompagnée des magnifiques dessins à l’encre de Jean-Yves Roy. Une belle façon de découvrir cet art poétique qu’est le haïku.

Pour en savoir plus sur l’éditeur, rendez-vous sur le site: http://editionsdeslisieres.com/des_lisieres.html

Les Éditions des Lisières have just published a new book (Nov. 2018) entitled Jack Kerouac et le haïku – Itinéraire dans l’errance. Bertrand Agostini (translator of The Book of Haikus, éditions La Table Ronde) joins Christiane Pajotin to introduce us to a new facet of Kerouac. This study is a revised and expanded edition of a1998 first edition and is accompanied by beautiful ink drawings by Jean-Yves Roy.

To find out more about the publisher, visit the website: http://editionsdeslisieres.com/des_lisieres.html

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In Women Writers of the Beat Era, Mary Paniccia Carden gives voice to these female writers and demonstrates how their work redefines our understanding of “Beat.” The first single-authored study on female writers of this generation, the book offers vital analysis of autobiographical works by Diane di Prima, ruth weiss, Hettie Jones, Joanne Kyger, and others, introducing the reader to new voices that interact with and reconfigure the better-known narratives of the male Beat writers. In doing so, Carden demonstrates the significant role women played in this influential and dynamic literary movement.

Dans Women Writers of the Beat Era, Mary Paniccia Carden donne une voix à ces femmes écrivains et montre comment leur travail change notre façon d’appréhender la culture Beat. Ce livre offre une analyse des travaux autobiographiques de Diane di Prima, ruth weiss, Hettie Jones, Joane Kyger, et bien d’autres, qui montre le rôle important que les femmes ont joué dans ce mouvement littéraire, dynamique et très masculin.

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For the first time in a single book, this anthology gathers ten women who dared to brave the shackles and taboos of the 1950s, a time when the right to be rebellious was a male privilege. The young slammers Sébastien Gavignet and Annalisa Mari Pegrum, authors of this bilingual anthology Beat Attitude, give pride of place to poets such as Hettie Jones, Lenore Kandel or Anne Waldman, who escaped male domination and were already announcing feminism, the counterculture and sexual liberation. A book as explosive as is necessary for our times!
Release date : 7th June 2018

Pour la première fois rassemblées dans un même ouvrage, voici dix femmes qui osèrent braver les carcans et les interdits des années 1950, à une époque où le droit d’être rebelle était un privilège masculin. Avec Beat Attitude les jeunes slameurs Sébastien Gavignet et Annalisa Mari Pegrum, auteurs de cette anthologie bilingue, rendent leur place légitime à des poètes telles que Hettie Jones, Lenore Kandel ou encore Anne Waldman. Elles ont su s’arracher à la domination masculine et annoncent déjà le mouvement féministe, la contre-culture et la libération sexuelle. Un livre aussi explosif que nécessaire à notre temps !
Parution le 7 juin 2018

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Erik Mortenson is pleased to announce the release of his new book, “Translating the Counterculture : The Reception of the Beats in Turkey” by Southern Illinois UP. As its title suggests, the book examines how the Beat legacy of dissent is being appropriated in contemporary Turkey.

Erik Mortenson est heureux de vous annoncer la parution de son nouveau livre “Translating the Counterculture : The Reception of the Beats in Turkey” édité par Southern Illinois UP. Comme son titre l’indique, le livre examine comment l’héritage de la contestation Beat est approprié dans la Turquie contemporaine.

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We are pleased to announce the publication of a new book this month, Beat Generation : L’inservitude volontaire, edited by Olivier Penot-Lacassagne – which features essays based on papers given at the colloquium that accompanied the major Centre Pompidou Beat Generation exhibition in 2016. Please find the summary below.

Nous sommes heureux d’annoncer la parution prochaine de Beat Generation : L’inservitude volontaire, publié sous la direction d’Olivier Penot-Lacassagne. Cet ouvrage regroupe des essais et articles présentés lors du colloque homonyme organisé au Centre Pompidou en septembre 2016, à l’occasion de l’exposition sur la Beat Generation. Résumé ci-dessous :

BEAT GENERATION

  • Global Beat Studies

    We are pleased to announce the publication of “Global Beat Studies“, the December 2016 special EBSN issue of CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access humanities and social sciences quarterly, published in affiliation with Purdue University. This is likely the largest ever single issue collection of Beat Studies articles, with major contributions to research in the field. It features many scholars who gave papers at the EBSN’s 2014 Conference in Tangier, and was edited by Oliver Harris and Polina Mackay.
    A huge thank-you to all the contributors for their hard work!
     
    With its internationalism and commitment to comparative work, CLCWeb is a great partner for the EBSN; in 2014, CLCWeb published nearly 900 texts that were downloaded some 415.000 times in 185 countries, while the total download of the journal’s material since 2007 in its pdf format has been 1.5 million. Beat Studies goes global…
  • Volume 4 of the Journal of Beat Studies, edited by Ronna Johnson and Nancy Grace, is just out.As well as featuring excellent essays on Burroughs by Michael Sean Bolton, on the Beats and Independent Film by Jane Falk, On Ginsberg by Anne Lovering Rounds and on Snyder by John Whalen Bridge, there’s an interview with the poet and playwright Rochelle Owens by Amy Friedman and a series of major book reviews, including Maria Damon on Tony Trigilio’s edition of Elise Cowen’s poetry, Jennie Skerl on Barry Miles’s Burroughs biography and a review by Katharine Streip of Oliver Harris’s restored editions of Burroughs’ Cut-Up Trilogy. See the homepage of the Beat Studies Association for further details (http://www.beatstudies.org/).
  •  Lost & Found Series V  features Kathy Acker, William S. Burroughs, Langston Hughes, and Jean Sénac: four major writers responding to sweeping socio-political shifts around the globe.
  • William S. Burroughs: The Travel Agency is on Fire The Travel Agency is on Fire is a selection of “cut-up” experiments by William S. Burroughs on texts by a range of canonical writers, from William Shakespeare and Arthur Rimbaud to William Wordsworth and James Joyce.

  • Collage in Twentieth Century Art Literature and Culture by Rona Cran 

Cran ANC flyer Sept 2014

  • A Poet Drives a Truck: Poems by and about Lowell A. Levant

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In this posthumous volume of Lowell A. Levant’s collected work, readers will notice four main qualities of his poems. First, as observed by his mentor, Pulitzer Prize winning poet Gary Snyder, there is “the complex depth of his writing about work, machinery, trucks.” Second, there is attunement with nature, characteristic of “Deep Ecology” poetry.  Third, there is music, which he also created when he played a Jew’s harp, sang, or strummed his guitar.  Finally, Lowell’s poetry often took the form of the unfiltered, unfettered, free-associative declarations of the Beat Poets of his time, particularly those of Allen Ginsberg, whom Lowell admired.

  • El Manifiesto Abomunista, Bob Kaufman translated by Zachary de los Dolores (Temática Editores Generales, Lima, 2013)

    El Manifiesto Abomunista es la primera traducción al español del libro del poeta Beat, Bob Kaufman. Adémas de la traducción completa del manifiesto, el libro también cuenta con una entrevista que une el movimiento contracultural de los Beats con movimientos similares de Latinoamérica: El Nadaísmo y el Movimiento Kloaka. Los poetas Eduardo Escobar de Colombia y Roger Santivañez del Perú hablan de las influencias de Movimiento Beat en los Movimientos que ellos fundaron.

    El Manifiesto Abomunista is the first translation in Spanish of the book by Beat poet, Bob Kaufman. Not just a complete translation of the manifesto, the book also contains an interview that ties the countercultural movement of the Beats to similar movements from Latin America: Nadaísmo and The Kloaka Movement. The poets Eduardo Escobar from Colombia and Roger Santivañez from Peru speak about the influences of the Beat movement on the movements that they founded.

  • Beatdom, Issue 10

Contents include:

Hinduism: A Different Beat by Ravi and Geetanjali Joshi Mishra

A Short History Of Buddhism In Berlin by Zeena Schreck

William S. Burroughs: My Confessional Letter to the Western Lands by Nikolas Schreck

Kitty Bruce on Lenny Bruce, Religion and Recovery, with Michael Hendrick

Forever Stung by Michael Hendrick

Eating The Beat Menu by Nick Meador

Tristessa: Heavengoing by Paul Arendt

One and Only By Gerald Nicosia reviewed by Michael Hendrick

The Weird Cult: How Scientology Shaped the Writing of William S. Burroughs by David S. Wills

Maggie Mae and the Band by Velourdebeast

  • The Transnational Beat Generation, edited by Nancy M. Grace and Jennie Skerl (Palgrave, 2012).

The book will be published in January.  This collection of scholarly essays maps the Beat Generation movement globally by exploring American Beat writers and parallel movements/writers in other countries that shared with the Beats both a critique of global capitalism and a sense of the permeability of national and cultural boundaries.  Thirteen essays by established and newer scholars in the field and an interview with poet Anne Waldman discuss not only iconic Beat authors Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Ferlinghetti, but less well-known writers such as Kyger, di Prima, Frazer, Kaufman, Joans, Whalen, and Trocchi.  Contributors also discuss Beat-related writers in Britain, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Greece, and Japan.

  • Mark Jacobs, San Fran ’60s (Escallonia Press)

San Fran ‘60s is a collection of autobiographical short stories about Sixties San Francisco. This is the only literary fiction from those spiritual descendants of the Beats, the core group of the Sixties Counter Culture.

Free copies are available to EBSN members at sanfran60s@gmail.com

  • Erik Mortenson, Capturing the Beat Moment: Cultural Politics and the Poetics of Presence (Southern Illinois UP, 2010).

Examining “the moment” as one of the primary motifs of Beat writing, this work explores the ways in which this moment is constructed and its ramifications for our understanding of the Beats and their writings.  While many excellent studies of particular Beat authors exist, this book takes a slightly different approach, examining the concepts of immediacy and presence as they occur across a range of Beat texts.  Contextualizing the Beats within the transition from the modern to the postmodern, it argues that the Beat desire to capture the passing moment makes their work crucial for an understanding of American culture and poetics.

The book is available from Southern Illinois University Press, and sells for $35.00.

See here for more details.