Dr David Stephen Calonne has written and edited a number of books around Beat-era American literature with a particular focus on Charles Bukowski. The recent collection More Notes of a Dirty Old Man will soon be followed by an appraisal for Reaktion’s Critical Lives series. With a James Franco adaptation of Ham on Rye in […]
All Experience Devolves To Gratitude: Dan Fante
Carrying the torch passed on by Bukowski and Hubert Selby Jr, for many Dan Fante is America’s most vital writer. Interview by Declan Tan Dan Fante is one of the last surviving writers of his generation that could be called a “maverick”. Having spent years in his own personal wilderness, and never touching a typewriter, […]
Jack Kerouac: Train in Motion
Jazz poet Roger Singer shares a vision of Kerouac on occasion of his 89th birthday The first book I read by Jack Kerouac was The Town and the City. It was his first novel in a long succession of works that followed and numerous books of poems. While reading this first published work by Kerouac […]
Barry Miles: The Beat Hotel
Nathan Cain 9 rue Git-le-Coeur is an address that looms large in the literary landscape of the last half of the twentieth century. It was, until 1963, the site of an anonymous, low-rent flophouse on the traditionally bohemian Left Bank. It would be a wholly unremarkable place, indistinguishable from the many other similar hotels in […]
William S. Burroughs: Last Words
Nathan Cain The works of William Seward Burroughs have always, even among those who think themselves the hippest of the hip, been considered a bit much. Without a doubt, Ginsberg and Kerouac have been the most popular authors of the Beat movement, but the fact remains that Kerouac’s reputation is based on one work of […]
