Serving as a primer for generational revolt and poetic expression, this collection brings readers the words, visions, and extravagant lives of bohemians, beatniks, hippies, punks, and slackers. 50 photos & illustrations. Readings.

The Outlaw Bible of American Literature will serve as a primer for generational revolt and an enduring document of the visionary tradition of authenticity and nonconformity in literature. This exuberant manifesto includes lives of the writers, on-the-scene testimony, seminal underground articles never before collected, photographs, cartoons, drawings, interviews, and, above all, the writings. Beat, Punk, Noir, Prison, Porn, Cyber, Queer, Anarchist, Blue Collar, Pulp, Sci-Fi, Utopian, Mobster, Political—all are represented. The Bible includes fiction, essays, letters, memoirs, journalism, lyrics, diaries, manifestoes, and selections from seminal film scripts, including Easy Rider, Apocalypse Now, and Taxi Driver. The editors have brought together an extravagant, eclectic, searing, and unforgettable body of work, showcasing Hustlers, Mavericks, Contrarians, Rockers, Barbarians, Gangsters, Hedonists, Provocateurs, Hipsters, and Revolutionaries—all in one raucous cauldron of rebellion and otherness. This prose companion to the best-selling award-winning Outlaw Bible of American Poetry features selections from Hunter S. Thompson, Exene Cervenka, Patti Smith, Dennis Cooper, Malcolm X, Sonny Barger, Maggie Estep, Lenny Bruce, Henry Miller, R. Crumb, Philip K. Dick, Iceberg Slim, Gil Scott-Heron, Kathy Acker, Jim Carroll, Charles Mingus, Norman Mailer, and many others.

Jew Boy is Alan Kaufman's riveting memoir of being raised by a Jewish mother who survived the Holocaust. This pioneering masterpiece, the very first memoir of its kind by a member of the Second Generation is Kaufman's coming-of-age account, by turns hilarious and terrifying, written with irreverent humor and poetic introspection. Throughout the course of his memoir, Kaufman touches on the pain, guilt, and confusion that shape the lives and characters of American-born children of Holocaust survivors. Kaufman struggles to comprehend what it means to be Jewish as he deals with the demons haunting his mother and attempts to escape his wretched home life by devoting himself to high school football. He eventually hitchhikes across the country, coming face-to-face with the phantoms he fled. Taking us from the streets of the Bronx to the highways of America, the kibbutzim and Israeli army to personal rebirth in San Francisco, and finally to a final reckoning in Germany, Jew Boy shines with the universal humanity of a brilliant writer embracing the gift of life. Kaufman's fierce passion will leave no reader untouched.

Frank, unsparing, often violent and disturbing, these poems speak in the voice of a young man trying to navigate the city he loves as he lives in the long shadow of his father's suffocating obsession with firearms. With the city of Baltimore as his backdrop, accomplished poet, author, and editor Dean Bartoli Smith offers a wrenching examination of our troubled attachments to place and the deepest wounds of the American psyche.

During the 20th Century, France was home to many of the world’s greatest poets. This collection highlights some of the very best verse that came out of a country and century defined by war and liberation. Let Paul Auster guide you through some of the best poetry that 20th century France has to offer. “Indispensable . . . a book that everyone interested in modern poetry should have close to hand, a source of renewable delights and discoveries, a book that will long claim our attention . . . To my knowledge, no current anthology is as full and as deftly edited.”—Peter Brooks, The New York Times Book Review “One of the freshest and most exciting books of poetry to appear in a long while . . . Paul Auster has provided the best possible point of entry into this century's most influential body of poetry.”—Geoffrey O'Brien, The Village Voice

A multicultural selection of contemporary poems by Puerto Rican and other poets who meet at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in New York City.

In the first biography of Ginsberg since his death in 1997 and the only one to cover the entire span of his life, Ginsberg's archivist Bill Morgan draws on his deep knowledge of Ginsberg's largely unpublished private journals to give readers an unparalleled and finely detailed portrait of one of America's most famous poets. Morgan sheds new light on some of the pivotal aspects of Ginsberg's life, including the poet's associations with other members of the Beat Generation, his complex relationship with his lifelong partner, Peter Orlovsky, his involvement with Tibetan Buddhism, and above all his genius for living.

Feminist icon bell hooks reminds us of the full spectrum of feeling we spend in love through her inspiring collection of love poetry, with a new introduction by Cole Arthur Riley, author of Black Liturgies. Written from the heart, When Angels Speak of Love is a book of fifty love poems by bell hooks, one our most beloved public intellectuals, and author of over twenty books, including the bestselling All About Love. Poem after poem, hooks challenges our views and experiences with love—tracing the links between seduction and surrender, the intensity of desire, and the anguish of death. “Love must clean house, choose memories to keep, and memories to let go,” she writes. These verses are expansive yet accessible—encompassing romantic love, to love of family, friends, or oneself. In any iteration, these poems remind us of both the beauty and possibility of love.

Alan Kaufman has been compared to Jack Kerouac, Henry Miller, Hubert Selby Jr., even Ernest Hemmingway—his life reads so much like a great movie that the world of cinema has just optioned his first memoir, Jew Boy, for a feature film. Drunken Angel, his new autobiographical work, drops like a sledgehammer. It is the most gripping, chilling and inspiring account ever written of a life-long battle with alcoholism and the struggle to write. Graphic in its grit, an education in pain, Drunken Angel is being hailed as "the Naked Lunch of memoirs." The book chronicles Kaufman’s headlong plunge into the piratical life of a literary drunk, and takes us shamelessly through noirish alleyways of S&M sensuality, forbidden pleasures and pitfalls of adultery, the thrilling horrors of war, plus raging poetry nights, mental illness, homelessness, literary struggle and his strange, magnificent rise into a sobriety of personal triumph as crazily improbable as the famous and notorious figures he meets along the way. Drunken Angel contains revealing portraits of such literary figures as Allen Ginsberg, Kathy Acker, Barney Rosset, Anthony Burgess, Elie Wiesel, Ron Kolm, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Jim Feast, Bernard Malamud, Hubert Selby Jr., Bob Holman, Sapphire, not to speak of the gutter dreamers, Nuyorican Poets, Unbearables, Babarians, Slammers, Black foot Indians, commandos, criminals, junkies, renegade cocktail waitresses, hoboes, painters, and a host of others who each in some way, big or small, play their part in peopling the wildly exilerating drama of Kaufman’s passionate and exotic life. Whether the addiction be booze, women, violence, writing or fame, Kaufman honors us with an explicit honesty that only a writer of enormous power and artistic greatness can attain, and his life, as Drunken Angel poignantly shows, is a profoundly meaningful quest for truth and spiritual values.

From the Beat poetry of the '50s to the spoken word of today, The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry brings readers the words, visions, and extravagant lives of bohemians, beatniks, hippies, punks, and slackers. Like Donald Allen's epochal New American Poetry, The Outlaw Bible will serve as a primer for generational revolt and poetic expression, and is an enduring document of the visionary tradition of authenticity and nonconformity in literature. This exuberant manifesto includes lives of the poets, on-the-scene testimony, seminal underground articles never before collected, photographs of clubs and cafes, interviews, and, above all, the poems.