Big Sur - Softcover

Kerouac, Jack

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0143126415 ISBN 13: 9780143126416

Publisher: Penguin Group USA, 2013

Synopsis

Soon to be a major motion picture starring Kate Bosworth, Josh Lucas, Anthony Edwards, and Radha Mitchell
"Each book by Jack Kerouac is unique, a telepathic diamond. With prose set in the middle of his mind, he reveals consciousness itself in all its syntatic elaboration, detailing the luminous emptiness of his own paranoiac confusion. Such rich natural writing is nonpareil in later half XX century, a synthesis of Proust, Celine, Thomas Wolfe, Hemingway, Genet, Thelonius Monk, Basho, Charlie Parker, and Kerouac's own athletic sacred insight.

""Big Sur"'s humane, precise account of the extraordinary ravages of alcohol delirium tremens on Kerouac, a suerior novelist who had strength to complete his poetic narrative, a task few scribes so afflicted have accomplished others crack up. Here we meet San Francisco's poets & recognize hero Dean Moriarty ten years after "On the Road." Jack Kerouac was a 'writer, ' as his great peer W.S. Burroughs says, and here at the peak of his suffering humorous genius he wrote through his misery to end with 'Sea, ' a brilliant poem appended, on the hallucinatory Sounds of the Pacific Ocean at Big Sur." Allen Ginsberg"

About this title

Review:

‘Big Sur has a swing and a concern with living, a feeling for nature, a self-doubting humour and an awareness of posture which puts it squarely in the powerful tradition of American folk writing. Stunning and vivid.’ Sunday Times

From the Back Cover:

'It's the first trip I've taken away from the home since the publication of On the Road, the book that "made me famous" and in fact so much so I've been driven mad for three years by endless telegrams, phone calls, requests, mail, visitors, reporters, snoopers... Me drunk practically all the time to put on a jovial cap to keep up with all this but finally realising I was surrounded and outnumbered and had to get away to solitude again or die...'

Written as the 'King of the Beats' was approaching middle-age, Big Sur reflects his struggle to come to terms with his own myth. The magnificent and moving novel of a man blessed by great talent and cursed with an urge towards self-destruction, Big Sur is at once Kerouac's toughest and his most humane work.

'In Big Sur, the mirror of the Beat way of life is hammered at and it shatters. The Kerouac hero 'cracks up' under the ministrations of his best friends, loved by his most devoted mistress, and while doing the things he has always liked best to do. It is a bitter iron and the force of it produces what is certainly Kerouac's grittiest novel.'
NEW YORK TIMES

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Group USA
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0143126415
• ISBN 13: 9780143126416
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 212