New Releases by Jack Kerouac

Written in just three days, The Subterraneans is the story of Leo Percepied, an aspiring writer and self-styled freewheeling bum who gravitates to the Subterraneans—impoverished intellectuals who haunt the bars and clubs of San Francisco, surviving on booze, Benzedrine, Proust, and Verlaine. Centering on the tempestuous and destructive relationship between Leo and Mardou Fox, a denizen of the San Francisco underground, The Subterraneans is an exuberant and melancholy tale of dark alleys and rooms and of artists and visionaries. Penguin Random House Canada is proud to bring you classic works of literature in e-book form, with the highest quality production values. Find more today and rediscover books you never knew you loved.

A reserved academic joins a salt-of-the-earth sailor for a tour of duty with the Merchant Marines in this early lost novel by the author of On the Road . "[ The Sea Is My Brother ] offers plenty of disarming insights into who Kerouac was as a person and writer before he slipped behind the mask of Beat Generation Zen-master . . . The book is enjoyable." — Wall Street Journal In the spring of 1943, not long after his first tour as a 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 and described it as a novel about "man''s simple revolt from society as it is, with the inequalities, frustration, and self-inflicted agonies." 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 at 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 Big Sur, 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. " The Sea is My Brother is a fascinating read, both in its own right and as part of Kerouac''s canon." —Litreactor.com

Collects 200 letters exchanged by the celebrated Beat movement writers to offer insight into their abiding friendship and artistic views, in a volume that spans the period from Ginsberg''s Columbia education until shortly before Kerouac''s death.

"And The Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks is an engaging, fast-paced read that shows the two authors'' developing styles. It is also an incomparable artifact, a legendary novel from the dawn of the Beat movement by two hugely influential writers."--BOOK JACKET.

From the acclaimed Beat writer, Jack Kerouac’s unique collection of personal travel writing, now reissued following his centenary celebration In his first directly autobiographical book, Jack Kerouac relates the exhilarating stories of the years he spent restlessly traveling and writing his acclaimed novels. He journeys from the California deserts crisscrossed by train tracks to the bullfights of Mexico to the Beat nightlife of New York City, and across the Atlantic to Paris, Morocco, and London. With echoes of landscapes that appear in his other novels, including The Dharma Bums and Desolation Angels, and featuring his distinctive exuberant style and “jazzy impressionistic prose” (New Yorker), Lonesome Traveler is a unique addition to Kerouac’s body of work.

From the renowned Beat writer, Kerouac’s colorful and meandering search for his family history, now reissued following his centenary celebration Satori in Paris is the semi-autobiographical tale of Jack Kerouac’s trip to France in search of his heritage. Beginning in Paris and moving west to Brittany, Kerouac traces the paths of his ancestors and explores his own understanding of the Buddhism that came to define his beliefs. From his familiar milieu of strangers and all-night conversations in seedy bars, to a pivotal cab ride in which he experiences Buddhism’s satori—a feeling of sudden understanding—Kerouac’s affecting and revolutionary writing transports the reader. Published at the height of his fame and showcasing his mature talent, Satori in Paris is a lyrical, rollicking tale of philosophy, identity, and the power and strangeness of travel.

The legendary 1951 scroll draft of On the Road, published word for word as Kerouac originally composed it Though Jack Kerouac began thinking about the novel that was to become On the Road as early as 1947, it was not until three weeks in April 1951, in an apartment on West Twentieth Street in Manhattan, that he wrote the first full draft that was satisfactory to him. Typed out as one long, single-spaced paragraph on eight long sheets of tracing paper that he later taped together to form a 120 foot scroll, this document is among the most significant, celebrated, and provocative artifacts in contemporary American literary history. It represents the first full expression of Kerouac’s revolutionary aesthetic, the identifiable point at which his thematic vision and narrative voice came together in a sustained burst of creative energy. It was also part of a wider vital experimentation in the American literary, musical, and visual arts in the post-World War II period. It was not until more than six years later, and several new drafts, that Viking published, in 1957, the novel known to us today. On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of On the Road, Viking will publish the 1951 scroll in a standard book format. The differences between the two versions are principally ones of significant detail and altered emphasis. The scroll is slightly longer and has a heightened linguistic virtuosity and a more sexually frenetic tone. It also uses the real names of Kerouac’s friends instead of the fictional names he later invented for them. The transcription of the scroll was done by Howard Cunnell who, along with Joshua Kupetz, George Mouratidis, and Penny Vlagopoulos, provides a critical introduction that explains the fascinating compositional and publication history of On the Road and anchors the text in its historical, political, and social context.

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.

In "Windblown World," distinguished Americanist Brinkley has gathered a selection of journal entries from the most pivotal period of Kerouac''s life, 1947-1954--a self-portrait of the artist as a young man.

A “wonderful” (The New York Times Book Review) and unique collection of love letters between Joyce Johnson and Jack Kerouac “A touching commentary not only on the Beat Generation but on what it’s like to be a young woman who loves a gifted, troubled guy with other things—besides love—on his mind.”—Elle On a blind date in Greenwich Village set up by Allen Ginsberg, Joyce Johnson (then Joyce Glassman) met Jack Kerouac in January 1957, nine months before he became famous overnight with the publication of On the Road. She was an adventurous, independent-minded twenty-one-year-old; Kerouac was already running on empty at thirty-five. Door Wide Open, containing the many letters the two of them wrote to each other, reveals a surprisingly tender side of Kerouac. It also shares a vivid and unusual perspective on what it meant to be young, Beat, and a woman in the Cold War fifties. Reflecting on those tumultuous years, Johnson seamlessly interweaves letters and commentary, bringing to life her love affair with one of American literature’s most fascinating and enigmatic figures.

The life of an American original in his own words, offering unparalleled insights into the mind and life of a giant of the American literary landscape.

The classic autobiographical novel by Jack Kerouac featuring "one of the most true, comic, and grizzly journeys in American literature" (Time)—now in a new edition Originally published in 1965, this autobiographical novel covers a key year in Jack Kerouac''s life—the period that led up to the publication of On the Road in September of 1957. After spending two months in the summer of 1956 as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak in the North Cascade Mountains of Washington, Kerouac''s fictional self Jack Duluoz comes down from the isolated mountains to the wild excitement of the bars, jazz clubs, and parties of San Francisco, before traveling on to Mexico City, New York, Tangiers, Paris, and London. Duluoz attempts to extricate himself from the world but fails, for one must "live, travel, adventure, bless, and don''t be sorry." Desolation Angels is quintessential Kerouac.

It was in his letters that Jack Kerouac set down the raw material that he transmuted into his novels, exploring and refining the spontaneous prose style that became his trademark. The letters in this volume, written between 1940, when Kerouac was a freshman at college, and 1956, immediately before his breathless leap into celebrity with the publication of On the Road, offer invaluable insights into Kerouac''s family life, his friendships with Neal and Carolyn Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and William S. Burroughs, his travels, love affairs, and literary apprenticeship. At once fascinating reading and a major addition to Kerouac scholarship, here is a rare portrait of the writer as a young adventurer of immense talent, energy, and ambition in the midst of writing and living an American legend.

Presents selections from Jack Kerouac''s novels, poetry, letters, and essays.

"What I''m beginning to discover now is something beyond the novel and beyond the arbitrary confines of the story. . . . I''m making myself seek to find the wild form, that can grow with my wild heart . . . because now I know MY HEART DOES GROW." -Jack Kerouac, in a letter to John Clellon Holmes Written in 1951-52, Visions of Cody was an underground legend by the time it was finally published in 1972. Writing in a radical, experimental form ("the New Journalism fifteen years early," as Dennis McNally noted in Desolate Angel), Kerouac created the ultimate account of his voyages with Neal Cassady during the late forties, which he captured in different form in On the Road. Here are the members of the Beat Generatoin as they were in the years before any label had been affixed to them. Here is the postwar America that Kerouac knew so well and celebrated so magnificently. His ecstatic sense of superabundant reality is informed by the knowledge of mortality: "I''m writing this book because we''re all going to die. . . . My heart broke in the general despair and opened up inward to the Lord, I made a supplication in this dream." "The most sincere and holy writing I know of our age." -Allen Ginsberg

Jack Kerouac’s classic novel about friendship, the search for meaning, and the allure of nature “In [On the Road] Kerouac’s heroes were sensation seekers; now they are seekers after truth . . . the novel often attains a beautiful dignity.”—Chicago Tribune First published in 1958, a year after On the Road put the Beat Generation on the map, The Dharma Bums stands as one of Jack Kerouac’s most powerful and influential novels. The story focuses on two ebullient young Americans—mountaineer, poet, and Zen Buddhist Japhy Ryder, and Ray Smith, a zestful, innocent writer—whose quest for Truth leads them on a heroic odyssey, from marathon parties and poetry jam sessions in San Francisco’s Bohemia to solitude and mountain climbing in the High Sierras.