The Dharma Bum’s Guide to Western Literature

Author: Dean Sluyter
Publisher: New World Library
ISBN: 1608687708
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 322

Book Description
HOW THE LITERATURE WE LOVE CONVEYS THE AWAKENING WE SEEK Suppose we could read Hemingway as haiku . . . learn mindfulness from Virginia Woolf and liberation from Frederick Douglass . . . see Dickinson and Whitman as buddhas of poetry, and Huck Finn and Gatsby as seekers of the infinite . . . discover enlightenment teachings in Macbeth, The Catcher in the Rye, Moby-Dick, and The Bluest Eye. Some of us were lucky enough to have one passionate, funny, inspiring English teacher who helped us fall in love with books. Add a lifetime of teaching Dharma — authentic, traditional approaches to meditation and awakening — and you get award-winning author Dean Sluyter. With droll humor and irreverent wisdom, he unpacks the Dharma of more than twenty major writers, from William Blake to Dr. Seuss, inspiring readers to deepen their own spiritual life and see literature in a fresh, new way: as a path of awakening.

Jack Kerouac: Road Novels 1957-1960 (LOA #174)

Author: Jack Kerouac
Publisher: Library of America Jack Keroua
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 898

Book Description
Presents Jack Kerouac's novel "On the Road" along with four other of his autobiographical "road books" and journal entries related to "On the Road."

The Sea Is My Brother

Author: Jack Kerouac
Publisher: Hachette+ORM
ISBN: 0306822474
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 360

Book Description
In the spring of 1943, during a stint in the 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. 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 in 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 Visions of Cody, 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.

Blaming Japhy Rider

Author: Philip A. Bralich
Publisher: BalboaPress
ISBN: 1452540535
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Book Description
Inspired by and responding to Jack Kerouacs Dharma Bums, this memoir details the psychological and spiritual triumph over severe psychological difficulties caused by a series of traumas endured in the Peace Corps in West Africa in 1978. Surveying the spiritual landscape of America through the seventies to the present in Zen, Tibetan Buddhist, New Age and Christian movements, this memoir describes the journey of author Philip A. Bralichs life, beginning as a twenty-something, leftist, married, seventies idealist in the Peace Corps in West Africa, through an accident in the bush that cost his wife her life and himself much of the use of he left leg, and through the growing and debilitating psychological difficulties that were finally resolved through wide reading and personal experience of many of the spiritual and psychological movements of those four decades. The book commences in West Africa in 1978 but also goes back to as early as 1973, just four years after Jack Kerouac died.

Big Sur

Author: Jack Kerouac
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101548819
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 214

Book Description
A poignant masterpiece of wrenching personal expression from the acclaimed author of On the Road “In many ways, particularly in the lyrical immediacy that is his distinctive glory, this is Kerouac’s best book . . . certainly he has never displayed more ‘gentle sweetness.’”—San Francisco Chronicle Jack Kerouac’s alter ego Jack Duluoz, overwhelmed by success and excess, gravitates back and forth between wild binges in San Francisco and an isolated cabin on the California coast where he attempts to renew his spirit and clear his head of madness and alcohol. Only nature seems to restore him to a sense of balance. In the words of Allen Ginsberg, Big Sur “reveals consciousness in all its syntactic elaboration, detailing the luminous emptiness of his own paranoiac confusion.”

Vanity of Duluoz

Author: Jack Kerouac
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101548436
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 270

Book Description
Written in 1967 from the vantage point of the psychedelic sixties, Vanity of Duluoz is a fascinating portrait of the artist as a young man Originally subtitled "An Adventurous Education, 1935-1946," Vanity of Duluoz presents the formative years in the life of Jack Duluoz—Kerouac's alter ego—beginning with his high school experiences as a sporting jock in small-town New England and his time at Columbia University on a football scholarship. Just as Jack's glamorous new adult life begins, so does World War II, and he joins the US Navy to travel the world. The more he experiences, the more he realizes the limits of his former plans, and decides to and return to New York, where he collides with the start of the Beat movement, and a riot of drugs, sex and writing. Vanity of Duluoz was Kerouac's final work published before his death in 1969.

The Devoted: A Novel

Author: Blair Hurley
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393651606
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 250

Book Description
A spellbinding confession of what it means to abandon one life for another, The Devoted asks what it takes, and what you’ll sacrifice, to find enlightenment. Nicole Hennessy’s life revolves around her Zen practice at the Boston Zendo, seeking solace in the tenets of Buddhism to the chagrin of her Irish Catholic family. After a decade of grueling spiritual practice under her Master’s tutelage, living on a shoestring budget as a shop clerk, Nicole has become dangerously entangled with her mentor. As Nicole confronts her past—a drug-fueled year spent fleeing her family’s loaded silences and guilt-laden "Our Fathers"—and reinvents herself in New York City, her Master’s intoxicating voice pursues her, an electrifying whisper on the other end of the phone. Somehow, he knows everything. In deft, soaring prose that bristles with psychological and erotic tension, Blair Hurley crafts a thrilling exploration of Nicole’s ecstatic quest for spirituality.

Penguin 75

Author: Paul Buckley
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
ISBN: 9780143117629
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 254

Book Description
A unique exploration into the subtle art of the book cover High standards in art and design have always been part of Penguin's publishing program. Now, on the occasion of Penguin's 75th anniversary, longtime art director Paul Buckley has chosen seventy-five covers that represent the best of what Penguin has produced over the course of the last decade. Giving readers a rare behind-thescenes glimpse into the complex creation of a book's cover, Penguin 75 includes comments from authors, agents, and editors, as well as the designers and artists themselves. This witty and irreverent journey into the book world will appeal to lovers of art, design, and, of course, books. With Contributions By: Paul Auster * Tara McPherson * Daniel Clowes * David Byrne * Elizabeth Gilbert * Joe Sacco * Tana French * T.C. Boyle * Seth * Tom Gauld * William T. Vollmann * Art Spiegelman * Kim Edwards * Melissa Bank * Ruben Toledo * Tomer Hanuka * Jamie Keenan * Roz Chast * Garrison Keillor * Yoshihiro Tatsumi * Sam Weber * Paul Sahre * Tony Millionaire * Nicholas Blechman * Jon Gray and many others!

Book of Blues

Author: Jack Kerouac
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101548800
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Book Description
Best known for his "Legend of Duluoz" novels, including On the Road and The Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac is also an important poet. In these eight extended poems, Kerouac writes from the heart of experience in the music of language, employing the same instrumental blues form that he used to fullest effect in Mexico City Blues, his largely unheralded classic of postmodern literature. Edited by Kerouac himself, Book of Blues is an exuberant foray into language and consciousness, rich with imagery, propelled by rythm, and based in a reverent attentiveness to the moment. "In my system, the form of blues choruses is limited by the small page of the breastpocket notebook in which they are written, like the form of a set number of bars in a jazz blues chorus, and so sometimes the word-meaning can carry from one chorus into another, or not, just like the phrase-meaning can carry harmonically from one chorus to the other, or not, in jazz, so that, in these blues as in jazz, the form is determined by time, and by the musicians spontaneous phrasing & harmonizing with the beat of time as it waves & waves on by in measured choruses." —Jack Kerouac

The Beats, Black Mountain, and New Modes in American Poetry

Author: Matt Theado
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1949979946
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 344

Book Description
The Beats, Black Mountain, and New Modes of American Poetry explores correspondences amongst the Black Mountain and Beat Generation writers, two of most well-known and influential groups of poets in the 1950s. The division of writers as Beat or Black Mountain has hindered our understanding of the ways that these poets developed from mutual influences, benefitted from direct relations, and overlapped their boundaries. This collection of academic essays refines and adds context to Beat Studies and Black Mountain Studies by investigating the groups’ intersections and undercurrents. One goal of the book is to deconstruct the Beat and Black Mountain labels in order to reveal the shifting and fluid relationships among the individual poets who developed a revolutionary poetics in the 1950s and beyond. Taken together, these essays clarify the radical experimentation with poetics undertaken by these poets.