Half a century after "founding" the Beat Generation, Allen Ginsberg has written this powerful collection of poems that are suffused with a range of emotional colors that gives Ginsberg's work an elegiac tone.

“The time is out of joint”. This famous line from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet helps to describe the impression of de-centering, of deconstruction, which we currently live and experience. This phenomenon is caused by various factors and while it is happening worldwide, partly as a result of globalization, it is perceived in different ways in the various cultures and countries in the world. We find ourselves in front of an hybrid individual, the product of different cultures blending together. Such is the novelty and the spread of new means of communication and of social organization, that we might be witnessing the rise of a new type of subject: a bearer of transformations, the extent of which is difficult to measure. The contemporary world is dominated by radically new media, virtual space, technologies that subvert the perception of our body, post-humanism tending towards the cyborg, a cult of the body and youth, new definitions of sexuality, of procreation and of the family – all this reveals to us an overflowing of the subject in the direction of a dislocated fragmentation, lying far beyond its traditional boundaries and identity.

In stories and poems that explore how our society shapes us, Identity Lessons features a wide array of ethnic perspectives on growing up in America. Leading the reader into the living-rooms, boardrooms, classrooms, and movie houses of America, distinguished writers from all points of the American ethnic landscape shed light on the space between conformity and difference, and examine the struggle between the need to belong and the pull of one's cultural roots. With insight, wit, and poignancy, the contributors to this anthology recall their attempts to reconcile family from the old country with the powerful messages about race, gender and class confronting them in their new surroundings. A collection of superb and moving writing, Identity Lessons deconstructs conceptions of personal and national identity, and forms an indispensable primer for understanding our cultural selves.

This is the ultimate guide to Jack Kerouac's New York, packed with photos from the '50s and '60s, and filled with information and anecdotes about the people and places that made history.

Happily Hippie: Meet a Modern Ethnicity rethinks hippies. Hippiedom didnt die; rather, as with other outgroups, it became socially invisible. Happily Hippie argues that the Counterculture is a 50-year-old ethnicity and explains Hippiedoms ethnogenesis. Well learn how anti-Hippie demagoguery has warped American politics, how the War on Drugs is largely about persecuting Hippie-America and how todays legalization movement is really about Hippie-America fighting for social equality. Happily Hippie documents the Countercultures many accomplishments, including inventing the Personal Computer; it estimates over 30 million Hippie-Americans and shows readers crude demographic maps of Hippie-America. We look at Hippies in philanthropy, Hollywood, sports, various arts, new medicine, the natural-foods industry, the Green movement and around the globe. Well see how stereotypes of Hippies echo those of other minorities, explore Hippie self-esteem issues, look at Hippie generational transfer and do some fun media analysis. Well also consider the need for a Hippie-American Ethnic Organization and how we might begin one. If youre Hippie, if youve ever been Hippie, read this book. It will change your head; it can change this world.

Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) was one of twentieth-century literature's most prolific letter-writers. This definitive volume showcases his correspondence with some of the most original and interesting artists of his time, including Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Neal Cassady, Lionel Trilling, Charles Olson, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Philip Whalen, Peter Orlovsky, Philip Glass, Arthur Miller, Ken Kesey, and hundreds of others. Through his letter writing, Ginsberg coordinated the efforts of his literary circle and kept everyone informed about what everyone else was doing. He also preached the gospel of the Beat movement by addressing political and social issues in countless letters to publishers, editors, and the news media, devising an entirely new way to educate readers and disseminate information. Drawing from numerous sources, this collection is both a riveting life in letters and an intimate guide to understanding an entire creative generation.

Lyric Eye: The Poetics of Twentieth-Century Surveillance presents the first detailed study of the relationship between poetry and surveillance. It critically examines the close connection between American lyric poetry and a burgeoning US state surveillance apparatus from 1920 to the 1960s. The book explores the myriad ways that poets—Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, W.H. Auden, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Sylvia Plath, Gertrude Stein, Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg and others—explored a developing and fraught environment in which the growing power of American investigative agencies, such as the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover, imposed new pressures on cultural discourse and personal identity. In analysing twentieth-century American poetry and its various ideas about "the self," Lyric Eye demonstrates the extent to which poetry and surveillance employ similar styles of information-gathering such as observation, overhearing, imitation, abstraction, repurposing of language, subversion, fragmentation and symbolism. Ground-breaking and prescient, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of literature, politics, surveillance and intelligence studies, and digital humanities.

Focuses on some of the most popular writers of the last forty years. One of the few books to explore the role of women and gender in the Beat movement.