“ This being human is a guest house. Every morning is a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor...Welcome and entertain them all. Treat each guest honorably. The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in. Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond. ” ― Rumi
The Beat Hotel is a delightful chronicle of a remarkable moment in American literary history. From the Howl obscenity trial to the invention of the cut-up technique, Barry Miles's extraordinary narrative chronicles the feast of ideas that was Paris, where
More than forty years after the publication of On the Road, Jack Kerouac is more widely read and revered by a new generation than ever before. Why this is so is the subject of Barry Miles's fresh and revealing portrait of the writer who is the acknowledge
Fear makes me a writer, fear and a lack of confidence. A major new biography on an increasingly important American literary icon, by the most acclaimed writer on the Beat Generation, Barry Miles. Miles knew all the key players in the Beat era, including W
Let your freak flag fly!Climb on the psychedelic bus with the Merry Pranksters and take the Acid Test….Groove on the streets of Haight-Ashbury during the Summer of Love….Get experienced with Hendrix at Monterey and commune with the mud and 400,000 fre
During the past year Paul McCartney has been in the public's eye more than at any time since the peak of Beatlemania over thirty years ago. His fans have been treated to the best-selling Flaming Pie and Standing Stone albums, a full hour of Paul on "Oprah
Iconoclast; visionary; homosexual crusader; drug advocate; teacher and elder statesman to the Beats: William Burroughs remains one of the most complex and controversial American writers of the twentieth century.After killing his wife in a bizarre shooting
Allen Ginsberg occupies a significant, enduring position in American literature. Following his death in '97, Barry Miles has drawn on both his long friendship with the poet & on Ginsberg's journals & correspondence to produce an immensely readable
Fifty years ago, Norman Mailer asserted, "William Burroughs is the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius." Few since have taken such literary risks, developed such individual political or spiritual ideas, or spanne
