In the summer of 1944, a shocking murder rocked the fledgling Beats. William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, both still unknown, we inspired by the crime to collaborate on a novel, a hard-boiled tale of bohemian New York during World War II, full of drugs and art, obsession and brutality, with scenes and characters drawn from their own lives. Finally published after more than sixty years, this is a captivating read, and incomparable literary artifact, and a window into the lives and art of two of the twentieth century’s most influential writers.

Circumcision of male infants and boys is a cultural practice that persists within some African, Pacific, Southern Asian and Middle Eastern cultures, and, as a medicalized ritual, in some Anglophone societies, especially the United States. Advocates describe circumcision as a benign snip with religious significance and health benefits. Critics argue that the health benefits are trivial, irrelevant or non-existent, and that parental power over a child's upbringing does not extend to authorizing a procedure that, in other contexts, would be regarded as sexual abuse. Circumcision is painful, causes permanent damage, and violates the right of the child to bodily integrity. Often overlooked in these debates are the adult men whose lives have been adversely affected because they were circumcised as infants or children. The suffering of these men remains cloaked in silence and unrecognized by the medical profession and society at large. In this book, 50 men, of widely differing ages and from varying walks of life, explain how circumcision has harmed their self-esteem, physical well-being and sexual experience. In analyzing these accounts, the compiler demonstrates that the process of grieving for a lost foreskin closely parallels the experiences of those who have suffered amputation, rape, body dysmorphic disorder, the death of a loved-one, or delayed post-traumatic stress. Circumcision advocates assert that the pain of circumcision is trivial and momentary; these accounts show that the pain of foreskin loss may last a lifetime.

“Dave Moore's work on this collection is simply awesome.... It should become and remain the definitive reference book for Beat scholars forever.” —Carolyn Cassady Neal Cassady is best remembered today as Jack Kerouac’s muse and the basis for the character “Dean Moriarty” in Kerouac’s classic On The Road, and as one of Ken Kesey’s merriest of Merry Pranksters, the driver of the psychedelic bus “Further,” immortalized in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. This collection brings together more than two hundred letters to Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, John Clellon Holmes, and other Beat generation luminaries, as well as correspondence between Neal and his wife, Carolyn. These amazing letters cover Cassady’s life between the ages of 18 and 41 and finish just months before his death in February 1968. Brilliantly edited by Dave Moore, this unique collection presents the “Soul of the Beat Generation” in his own words—sometimes touching and tender, sometimes bawdy and hilarious. Here is the real Neal Cassady—raw and uncut.

A luminous, intimate, and transcendental glimpse into the mind of Jack Kerouac, one of the most original voices of the twentieth century “Sketching . . . Everything activates in front of you in myriad profusion, you just have to purify your mind and let it pour the words and write with 100% personal honesty.” In 1951, it was suggested to Jack Kerouac by his friend Ed White that he “sketch in the streets like a painter but with words.” In August of the following year, Kerouac began writing down prose poem “sketches” in small notebooks that he kept in the breast pockets of his shirts. For two years he recorded travels, observations, and meditations on art and life as he moved across America and down to Mexico and back. The poems are often strung together so that over the course of several of them, a little story—or travelogue—appears, complete in itself. In 1957, Kerouac sat down with the fifteen handwritten sketch notebooks he had accumulated and typed them into a manuscript called Book of Sketches. Published for the first time, this work offers a detailed portrait of Kerouac at a key period of his literary career.

A compact collection of more than 500 poems from Jack Kerouac that reveal a lesser known but important side of his literary legacy “Above all, a haiku must be very simple and free of all poetic trickery and make a little picture and yet be as airy and graceful as a Vivaldi pastorella.”—Jack Kerouac Renowned for his groundbreaking Beat Generation novel On the Road, Jack Kerouac was also a master of the haiku, the three-line, seventeen-syllable Japanese poetic form. Following the tradition of Basho, Buson, Shiki, Issa, and other poets, Kerouac experimented with this centuries-old genre, taking it beyond strict syllable counts into what he believed was the form’s essence. He incorporated his “American” haiku in novels and in his correspondence, notebooks, journals, sketchbooks, and recordings. In Book of Haikus, Kerouac scholar Regina Weinreich has supplemented a core haiku manuscript from Kerouac’s archives with a generous selection of the rest of his haiku, from both published and unpublished sources.

With the publication of Naked Lunch in 1959, William Burroughs abruptly brought international letters into the postmodern age. Beginning with his very early writing (including a chapter from his and Jack Kerouac's never-before-seen collaborative novel), Word Virus follows the arc of Burroughs's remarkable career, from his darkly hilarious "routines" to the experimental cut-up novels to Cities of the Red Night and The Cat Inside. Beautifully edited and complemented by James Grauerholz's illuminating biographical essays, Word Virus charts Burroughs's major themes and places the work in the context of the life. It is an excellent tool for the scholar and a delight for the general reader. Throughout a career that spanned half of the twentieth century, William S. Burroughs managed continually to be a visionary among writers. When he died in 1997, the world of letters lost its most elegant outsider.

In the spring of 1943, during a stint in the Merchant Marine, twenty-one-year old Jack Kerouac set out to write his first novel. Working diligently day and night to complete it by hand, he titled it The Sea Is My Brother. Now, nearly seventy years later, its long-awaited publication provides fascinating details and insight into the early life and development of an American literary icon. Written seven years before The Town and The City officially launched his writing career, The Sea Is My Brother marks a pivotal point in which Kerouac began laying the foundations for his pioneering method and signature style. A clear precursor to such landmark works as On the Road, The Dharma Bums, and Visions of Cody, it is an important formative work that bears all the hallmarks of classic Kerouac: the search for spiritual meaning in a materialistic world, spontaneous travel as the true road to freedom, late nights in bars and apartments engaged in intense conversation, the desperate urge to escape from society, and the strange, terrible beauty of loneliness.

Discusses the lives and marriage of Edie Parker Kerouac and Jack Kerouac.

Written in 1967 from the vantage point of the psychedelic sixties, Vanity of Duluoz is a fascinating portrait of the artist as a young man Originally subtitled "An Adventurous Education, 1935-1946," Vanity of Duluoz presents the formative years in the life of Jack Duluoz—Kerouac's alter ego—beginning with his high school experiences as a sporting jock in small-town New England and his time at Columbia University on a football scholarship. Just as Jack's glamorous new adult life begins, so does World War II, and he joins the US Navy to travel the world. The more he experiences, the more he realizes the limits of his former plans, and decides to and return to New York, where he collides with the start of the Beat movement, and a riot of drugs, sex and writing. Vanity of Duluoz was Kerouac's final work published before his death in 1969.