Beautiful but uncategorizable music flowed through Lhasa de Sela (1972-2010), whose itinerant, off-the-grid childhood with spiritually-inclined parents allowed ...
The hardnosed, hard-living Southern writer once dubbed himself ‘Freak City’ and, despite a lifestyle (booze, drugs, fistfights, etc.) that would have floored mo...
Spiraling down a silo of despair and drunkenness in the wake of his On The Road/Dharma Bums celebrity as ‘king of the Beats’, Jack Kerouac longed for a safe hav...
Ken Kesey assembled his Merry Pranksters and other kindred spirits for one more, and final, prank—a semi-regular book series that contained pieces of his unfini...
Rod McKuen was labeled ‘The King of Kitsch’ by critics and “McGoon” by academics (a label that included Bob Dylan too) and hated by the hipsters. And yet, Richa...
When the young Beat novelist (Kerouac) met the old bohemian poet (Bodenheim) in 1951, they were headed in opposite directions. Jack Kerouac was just lighting hi...
A visually stunning new book details the history, rise and fall of “social athletic clubs” in Chicago, before the gang bangers made a mockery of the concept. Mo...
There were once two men named Jerry: Salinger and Lewis. And one of them wrote a famous novel, Catcher In the Rye, which the other wanted to turn into a movie, ...
The novelist J.G. Ballard created language so unique that, according to renowned poet and novelist Jeremy Reed, he was like “a tourist from the future whose the...
The longtime publishing insider and agent Sterling Lord is still keeping the Beat flames burning for Kerouac, Ferlinghetti and Kesey. PKM's Benito Vila spent a ...
Marianne Joan Elliott-Said (1957-2011), aka Poly Styrene, was a punk pioneer in ways that are only now being fully appreciated. As the leader of X-Ray Spex, her...
From her pre-punk perch as a record company publicist and journalist in London, Vivien Goldman immersed herself in the sounds that most moved her--reggae and th...
The Dom, a book recently published in Poland, covers the untold story of Lower East Side’s counterculture in the period of time just before the events in Please...
Comics historian Jon B. Cooke has whipped up a Please Kill Me-like oral history of underground comix of the late 1970s and 1980s. Specifically, he tells the h...
