It is possibly Supervert‘s most impressive book beauty to date, judging not only from the immaculate white-and-black antiseptic look of it and the heft of it — the text comes to 240 pages — but also, obviously, from the read of it. At one level POST-DEPRAVITY is a page turner (literally) and at another a […]

My staff of thousands insisted on this posting. Postscript: And before I forget — 9/11: THE DAY OF, THE DAY AFTER, THE WEEK AFTER. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

I was having such a great time re-reading one of Nelson Algren’s “lesser” books — Who Lost An American? — that I scanned a little excerpt from the second story, “Down With All Hands,” and sent it to Gerard Bellaart. It struck a nerve. He sent back one of his choice Cold Turkey cards. In […]

… showed up in the mail. It’s a pristine book of gem-like beauties, the poems finely cut and paired with the author’s drawings. small lines on the great earth is divided into six sections. The section titles strung together make the perfect Malcolm Ritchie poem on their own. Like so: small lines on the great […]

Apparently not much has changed since Céline wrote that 82 years ago in Journey to the End of the Night, his first semi-autobiographical novel. The narrator Ferdinand Bardamu is talking about the Joseph Bioduret Institute, which “is clearly the Pasteur Institute,” according to Ralph Mannheim, who translated the novel. Here’s the complete passage: Glory, in […]

A marvel known as “Library Walk” runs the length of two city blocks, memorializing the world’s great writers with 96 bronze reliefs set into the sidewalk on granite plaques. This is one of them. And here is Dylan Thomas’s plaque. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Charley Plymell’s long, seemingly endless strings of emails are fascinating to read. He has known so many Beat writers and artists and has popped up in so many places with them that I can’t help thinking of him — half in wonder and half in disbelief — as the Zelig of the Beat Generation. Unlike […]