The Beat Generation
Whistlestop Bookshop opened in 1985. When I think about writers or categories or particular books that have sold steadily, without flagging, for over 30 years, I think I learn about my own philosophy of bookselling, I learn about my customers over time and generations, and I learn about the literature. Sometimes it is a book (Goodnight, Moon, say, or Killer Angels), sometimes it is a category (science fiction/fantasy or nature guides), and sometimes a particular author (Kurt Vonnegut, Jane Austen). I am both surprised and pleased that the Beats have sold since the beginning and show no signs of slowing down.
The history of the Beat Generation is complex and absorbing. Think of analogies being the Transcendentalists or the Lost Generation. Briefly and unfairly summarized, think of a small group of writers from very different backgrounds meeting at Columbia University after World War Two, creating the beginnings of a network that was nurtured in New York City but soon found simultaneous developments in San Francisco and the Pacific Northwest.
The Beats recognized and valued spontaneity, non-conformity, spiritual quests outside of social structures, suspicion of materialism, the intimate conversation between music (especially jazz) and language, and a burning, sometimes self-destructive, passion for freedom.
As you can see in our offerings here, Jack Kerouac was a central figure, as were Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Other names are here, too -- William S. Burroughs, Jr., Gary Snyder, Kenneth Rexroth, Carolyn Cassady. I will add titles and writers as I remember the associations, and as new critical or historical evaluations are published. Enjoy what my customers have been celebrating for three decades plus now!
Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs
Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs
“Last Words . . . presents fresh cues to the larger design of [Burroughs’s] imagination, and a means of gaining a renewed perspective on his work.” –The New York Times Book Review
The author of Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs is one of the most celebrated literary outlaws of our time. Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs is the most intimate work Burroughs ever wrote, a complex portrait of Burroughs at the end of his life, coming to terms with aging and death.
Culled from journal entries of the last nine months of his life, Last Words spans the realms of cultural criticism, personal memoir, and fiction. Classic Burroughs concerns—rants on U.S. drug policy, contempt of the state of the human race, his love for his cats—permeate the book. He breaks into classic “routines’ and provides frequent commentary on whatever he is reading—from high literature to low-brow thrillers.
The “Old Man” emerges as frequently comical, sometimes meditative, always engaged—a commentator on the state of the world and the self. Most significantly, Last Words reveals the most open and vulnerable Burroughs we have ever seen. His reflections on the deaths of his friends Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary provide a window on the preparations Burroughs was making for his own death—a quest for absolution marked by a profound sense of guilt and loss.
Last Words is unlike anything else in the oeuvre of William S. Burroughs. It is the purest, most personal work ever presented by this writer, and a poignant portrait of the man, his life, and his creative process—one that never quit, even in the shadow of death.
“Last Words . . . presents fresh cues to the larger design of [Burroughs’s] imagination, and a means of gaining a renewed perspective on his work.” –The New York Times Book Review
“Austerely moving . . . Burroughs frequently becomes a homilist in Last Words, a priestly scribe offering spare but fierce opinions . . . what a singular voice he had.” –Bookforum
“These heroic and generous transcriptions . . . show a Burroughs who has curiously changed, and yet become more himself than ever. . . . With its distinctly fraying texture, its knots of bee-in-bonnet anger, its forgettings and repetitions and cherished quotations, Burroughs’s journal is an addition not just to the literature of swansongs (like Harold Brodkey’s This Wild Darkness) but of ageing itself (like Beckett’s late poem “What is the Word”).” –The Times Literary Supplement
“Burroughs considers his old age with a mix of wry humor, scattershot rancor, and intimate rue. . . . Precious to all Burroughs devotees.” –Publishers Weekly