The Sea is My Brother was Jack Kerouac's first attempt at a novel. Technically it fits the criteria of a novella, the original manuscript weighing in at 158 pages. Published for the first time in its entirety by Penguin Classics (2011) and bound together … [Read more...]
Book Review – Baby Driver by Jan Kerouac
While I was being gifted a tiny grocery store carrot cake for my fifteenth birthday in a park in Connecticut, still on the road myself, Jan Kerouac passed away. It was June 5, 1996. I had no idea who Jan Kerouac was, wouldn’t know for another 8 or so … [Read more...]
Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut (Misadventures in the Counter-Culture) by Paul Krassner
New World Digital Publishing (2010) / ISBN-13: 978-0982531433 Having racked my brains in search of the perfect opening, I'll just wing it by saying that "reading Paul Krasner’s Expanded Edition of his 1993 Confessions of a Raving Unconfined Nut … [Read more...]
Book Review – Time Adjusters & Other Stories by Bill Ectric
The modern fables that make up Bill Ectric's new collection of stories, Time Adjusters, are difficult to classify, in the best way possible. They seem a comic-book mishmash of science fiction and magical realism, one turn of the screw toward another … [Read more...]
A Coney Island of the Mind by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
I first found Lawrence Ferlinghetti's A Coney Island of the Mind while an undergraduate, finding the wry attacks on the established order refreshing and invigorating. Ferlinghetti protests and rages against the madness of the nuclear age, against the … [Read more...]
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
"I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had gotten over a serious illness that I won't bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that everything was dead." This central … [Read more...]
The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac
I encountered The Dharma Bums for the first time in college, on a classmate's shelf. She gushed about the book, but I was more interested in her roommate and didn't pay enough attention. Many years later, I finally read it on a lonely road trip … [Read more...]
Big Sur by Jack Kerouac
Big Sur is often ignored by critics and Kerouac fans alike. We all want the freedom of On the Road, the craziness of The Dharma Bums — the celebration of the Beat lifestyle. We want young Jack living his American Dream of the road. But Big Sur … [Read more...]
Book Review — Tristessa by Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac is primarily lauded for his keen understanding of male friendship. The female characters of On the Road or The Dharma Bums never really achieve the reader's interest the way the males do. But Kerouac is also a writer of exquisitely sad love … [Read more...]
Book Review — Visions of Cody by Jack Kerouac
Like a weird, mutated ogre muttering to himself by the roadside, Jack Kerouac's Visions of Cody stands apart. As the author states in his short introduction, "I wanted a vertical metaphysical study of Cody's character and its relationship to the general … [Read more...]
Book Review — Vanity of Duluoz by Jack Kerouac
When Vanity of Duluoz: An Adventurous Education, 1935-46 was written in 1967, an overweight and severely alcoholic Jack Kerouac had only two years to live. Chronicling the years just before his adventures with Neal Cassady, his last complete volume takes … [Read more...]
Book Review — Dr. Sax by Jack Kerouac
Dr. Sax is one of Jack Kerouac's most troubling books for readers, peering behind the curtain of his childhood rather than exploring those later years of Beats and bodhisattvas. Nevertheless, it remains a startling achievement, unique not only among … [Read more...]
Book Review – Tamper by Bill Ectric
Tamper, the new book by Bill Ectric, frames itself as a boy named Whit's effort to comprehend his past. Did he have a prophetic dream about a bag of bones on the side of the road? Did his friend Paul Clemmons really disappear in a pile of leaves, never … [Read more...]
Book Review — Beatitude Golden Anniversary: 1959-2009
Beatitude Golden Anniversary 1959-2009 / Edited by Latif Harris and Neeli Cherkovski / Latif Harris / San Francisco / 2009. The publisher provided Empty Mirror with a review copy. Beatitude magazine came into existence in 1959, in San Francisco's … [Read more...]
Book Review – Who was Sinclair Beiles?
Who was Sinclair Beiles? / Gary Cummiskey & Eva Kowalska, editors / Dye Hard Press / 2009 / 978-0-620-42792-0 Before I opened Dye Hard Press' new volume, its title, Who was Sinclair Beiles? was a question I certainly didn't know the answer to. His is a … [Read more...]
Book Review – Michael Rothenberg’s poetry collection, Unhurried Vision
Unhurried Vision La Alameda Press, Alburquerque, NM, 2004 Unhurried Vision, and in this manner so it reads, from one new year to the next scribing a journal of living (1999) poetically in the moment, a creative endeavor of complex simplicity - as with … [Read more...]
