Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

A Different Beat: Writing by Women of the Beat Generation (High Risk Books)

This anthology gathers the Beat-period writings of 26 women who were often overshadowed by their male contemporaries, but whose art both shaped the Beat aesthetic and laid the cornerstone for the outlaw female artists of today. Among the featured writers are Jan Kerouac, Joan Haverty Kerouac, Eileen Kaufman, Diane Di Prima, Ruth Weiss, and many others.

Happy Birthday of Death

by Gregory Corso

New Addresses

by Kenneth Koch

Kenneth Koch, who has already considerably "stretched our ideas of what it is possible to do in poetry" (David Lehman), here takes on the classic poetic device of apostrophe, or direct address. His use of it gives him yet another chance to say things never said before in prose or in verse and, as well, to bring new life to a form in which Donne talked to Death, Shelley to the West Wind, Whitman to the Earth, Pound... (more)

Naked Angels: Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs

Naked Angels: Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs

by John Tytell

Energy, conviction, and unexpected brilliance.-New Yorker. The definitive history of the 'beat generation'.... It is an authoritative piece of literary history as a result of which Kerouac, Burroughs, and Ginsberg will be read with greater understanding, sympathy, and insight.-Leon Edel. Naked Angels is continually illuminating...written with insight, passion, and an awareness of just how prophetic these men were... (more)

Myths and Texts Paradise Lost

by Gary Snyder

Axe Handles: Poems

by Gary Snyder

This is a collection of discovery, of insight, and of vision. These poems see the roots of community in the family, and the roots of culture and government in the community. "In making the handle of an axe by cutting wood with an axe the model is indeed near at hand." In exploring this axiom of Lu Ji’s, Gary Snyder continues: I am an axe And my son a handle, soon To be shaping again, model And tool, craft of... (more)

Danger on Peaks: Poems

by Gary Snyder

As a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, bioregional activist, Zen Buddhist, and reluctant counterculture guru, Gary Snyder has been a major artistic force in America for over five decades, extending far beyond the Beat poems that first brought his work into the public eye. Danger on Peaks begins with poems about Snyder’s first ascent of Mount St. Helens in 1945 and his learning that atomic bombs had been dropped... (more)

No Nature: New and Selected Poems

by Gary Snyder

"The greatest of living nature poets. . . . It helps us to go on, having Gary Snyder in our midst."--Los Angeles Times. Snyder is the author of many volumes of poetry and prose, including The Practice of the Wild and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Turtle Island. Reading tour.

The Back Country

by Gary Snyder

The Back Country is one of Gary Snyder's most serious engagements with Eastern culture and thought. Much of the book works to achieve a perspective by means of contrast, as in "Hitch Haiku," a series of haiku (a Japanese form of imagistic, syllabic verse) mostly set in the American West. Perhaps the strongest poem is "Oil," in which Snyder envisions a tanker as a needle bringing our addicted nation "long... (more)

Turtle Island

by Gary Snyder

These Pulitzer Prize-winning poems and essays by the author of No Nature range from the lucid, lyrical, and mystical to the political. All, however, share a common vision: a rediscovery of North America and the ways by which we might become true natives of the land for the first time.

South of No North; Stories of the Buried Life.: Stories of the Buried Life

South of No North; Stories of the Buried Life.: Stories of the Buried Life

by Charles Bukowski

Charles Bukowski is one of America's best-known contemporary writers of poetry and prose, and, many would claim, its most influential and imitated poet. He was born in Andernach, Germany, and raised in Los Angeles, where he lived for fifty years. He published his first story in 1944, when he was twenty-four, and began writing poetry at the age of thirty-five. He died in San Pedro, California, on March 9, 1994, at... (more)

All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers : A Novel

All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers : A Novel

by Larry McMurtry

Ranging from Texas to California on a young writer's journey in a car he calls El Chevy, All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers is one of Larry McMurtry's most vital and entertaining novels. Danny Deck is on the verge of success as an author when he flees Houston and hurtles unexpectedly into the hearts of three women: a girlfriend who makes him happy but who won't stay, a neighbor as generous as she is... (more)

Angelheaded Hipster

by Steve Turner

The Book of Tea: The Classic Work on the Japanese Tea Ceremony and the Value of Beauty

The Book of Tea: The Classic Work on the Japanese Tea Ceremony and the Value of Beauty

by Kakuzo Okakura

THE BOOK OF TEA has served for more than a century as one of the most perceptive introductions to Asian life and thought in English. Publication of the book was a pioneering effort in the cultural bridge-building between East and West. Kakuzo Okakura perceived chanoyu—literally, "the way of tea"—as a form of spiritual culture, a discipline that transforms itself into the Art of Life. In writing of chanoyu, his... (more)

Gasoline (City Lights Pocket Poets Series)

Gasoline (City Lights Pocket Poets Series)

by Gregory Corso

Gregory Corso was born on March 26, 1930 in New York City. His first book of poetry was published by City Lights Press in 1955.

David's Copy: The Selected Poems of David Meltzer (Penguin Poets)

David's Copy: The Selected Poems of David Meltzer (Penguin Poets)

by David Meltzer

One of the most respected poets of the Beat and San Francisco Renaissance periods, David Meltzer has kept alive interest in the interface between jazz and poetry that exploded in the 1950s. This new edition of selected poems includes previously unpublished material and serves as a map to this very prolific and interesting poet.

Jim Morrison: Lords and New Creatures

by James Morrison

The Beats: A Literary Reference

One critic in the 1950s acidly declared them the "Bleat Generation." Yet the Beats have survived their worst publicity. No matter that J. Edgar Hoover cited them and communists as the two greatest threats to American society, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl is now considered by many to be the most influential poem by an American in the twentieth century and Jack Kerouac’s bestselling and groundbreaking novel On the Road... (more)

San Francisco Beat

by David Meltzer

Thirty years ago, poet David Meltzer interviewed his poet friends Rexroth, McClure, Ferlinghetti, Everson, and Welch for The San Francisco Poets . Now he has combined these classic interviews with new talks with McClure, Ferlinghetti, Lamantia, Kyger, Snyder, Hirschman, Di Prima, Micheline, Whalen, and Meltzer-along with follow-up interviews with friends of Everson and Rexroth. San Francisco Beat is an archive... (more)

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by Diane DiPrima

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by Gregory Corso

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by Gary Snyder

by Gary Snyder

by Gary Snyder

by Gary Snyder

by Gary Snyder

by Gary Snyder

by Charles Bukowski

by Larry McMurtry

by Steve Turner

by Kakuzo Okakura

by Gregory Corso

by David Meltzer

by James Morrison

by David Meltzer