The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #232: Mary Morris
“To really write, I need to hold a pen.”
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Posts Tagged: jack kerouac
The Queer Syllabus: Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg
In The Queer Syllabus, writers nominate works for a new canon of queer literature.
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Reading Ferlinghetti in the Age of Trump
This lesson feels especially relevant to our moment: that it’s possible to be both a frustrated activist and also a present and joyful human being.
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Staying Syncretic: A Conversation with Kool A.D.
Kool A.D. discusses his debut novel, OK, the war on drugs, systemic destruction of left-leaning movements by the government, and the inability to escape American capitalism.
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The Rumpus Interview with Erik Kennedy
Poet Erik Kennedy discusses literary community and his formative years as a young writer in New Jersey, and shares two new prose poems.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #54: Jade Chang on The Wangs vs. the World
With a mix of humor, agility, and insight, Jade Chang’s debut novel, The Wangs vs. the World (HMH Books, October 2016), tells a fresh immigrant story. Charles Wang has left his native homeland to become a successful businessman in America. The book takes us on a journey with his whole family as they navigate the […]
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Remarks On Walking Around in Boston
As you walk, you become intensely aware in two directions. There is the outer world, and there is your head space. It is not necessary or possible really to keep strict focus on one or the other. They blend together.
...moreMapping Literary Road Trips
What is more American than the road trip? Steven Melendez has created an astonishingly detailed interactive map of the beloved institution as documented in twelve works of American literature. The books featured include Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Mark Twain’s Roughing It, John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, and Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Acid […]
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FUNNY WOMEN #131: Writing Prompts for Girls and Women
Write a character who can walk home alone at night while feeling unafraid.
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The Rumpus Interview with Sean Wilsey
Sean Wilsey discusses his latest book of essays, More Curious, being David Foster Wallace’s neighbor, the healing power of the American road trip, and the difference between writing fiction and memoir.
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Lines Like Loss, Like Leaving
I know you understand me when I tell you this. I know you understand dead of night. Tell me what lines you’ve read so I know how to imagine you. Tell me who is gone. Tell me if you, like me, always think of going.
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On the Road Again
What gives the road movie (or, more broadly, the epic voyage) its staying power across cultures and time is an intrinsic narrative structure with a built-in beginning and end in the form of a starting point and destination.
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Kerouac’s House and the End of Doubt
A perfectionist who claws for each word, I could use a little spontaneity. How tempting to try loosening up, to compose wildly, undisciplined, the “crazier the better.” To accept that I’m a genius all the time.
...moreAlmost On The Road
The New Yorker has unlocked a selection of Jack Kerouac’s journals that ran in the magazine back in 1998. Beginning with his near-completion of Town and City, and ending days after its publication, the text captures the growing pains of a 25-year-old author: Got form-rejection card from Macmillan’s. I’m getting more confident and angrier each […]
...moreOn the Road for non “beatnik groupies”
Craving to be a ‘50s vagabond like Kerouac’s Sal Paradise but fear traveling without your GPS? On the Road fans worry need not worry! Gregor Weichbrodt has “rewritten” the entire novel solely using Google Maps driving directions. The open-source book is fifty-five pages long and only features 17,527 miles. Weichbrodt says about his work, “If […]
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The Cool School edited by Glenn O’Brien
Tyler Doyle reviews THE COOL SCHOOL, edited by Glenn O’Brien, today in The Rumpus Book Review.
...moreNew York through Jack Kerouac’s Eyes
Maria Popova from Brain Pickings takes a look at a chapter titled “New York Scenes” from Kerouac’s 1960 book, Lonesome Traveler. According to Popova, the chapter is “a kind of narrative emotional cartography of Manhattan, woven of fascinating sketches of Gotham’s vibrant life and cast of characters as recorded in Kerouac’s travel journals, written in his signature […]
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“Collected Poems” by Jack Kerouac
You know Jack Kerouac. Everyone knows Jack Kerouac. Father of the Beat generation, though he disliked that label, author of the free thinkers bible On the Road, culture maker, lover of the mad, and general all around badass. He receives as much posthumous love as any other dead author, perhaps more; this year saw the […]
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Missing the Beat: The Story of Adapting Kerouac’s On The Road
In 1957, shortly after the publication of his second novel, On The Road, Jack Kerouac wrote a letter to Marlon Brando, pleading with him to buy the movie rights to the book.
...moreSarah Simpson: The Last Book I Loved, The Subterraneans
Truman Capote famously said that what Jack Kerouac did wasn’t writing, but typing. I take just as much offense today to this slander as I did ten years ago as an undergraduate when first hearing it quoted by an English professor.
...moreBeat Generation Brought to the Stage
Beat Generation, Kerouac’s only known full-length play, will premiere this year in eight performances as part of October’s Jack Kerouac Literary Festival in Lowell, Massachusetts. The play was written in 1957 and shelved for half a century before being uncovered in a Jersey City warehouse in 2004. (Via Book Bench)
...moreThe Commercialization of Literature
Jack Kerouac’s literary imprint has made its way into some surprising mediums–a t-shirt sold at Urban Outfitters, a lyric of a Katy Perry single. Though the commercialization of literature isn’t exactly breaking news, it is interesting to track the ways in which art is being commodified or stripped from its original literary roots and regurgitated […]
...moreOld Books with New Tricks
The Wasteland, complete with new apps for the contemporary reader, replaced a Marvel comic as an iPad top seller recently. This week, On the Road shuffles its way onto the same list-also with a shiny new set of apps. Interactive maps, footnotes, photos, even audio clips of Keroauc reading and sets of documents never before […]
...more“Dear Marlon…”
“I’m praying that you’ll buy On the Road and make a movie of it…. I visualize the beautiful shots could be made with the camera on the front seat of the car showing the road (day and night) unwinding into the windshield, as Sal and Dean yak…. You play Dean and I’ll play Sal.” A […]
...moreNaked Breakfast
Good Morning. Hungry? Why not listen to William S. Burroughs reading from Naked Lunch? Or how about viewing some of the Naked Lunch manuscript? Or pictures of different editions of the book since its publication in 1959? Or hell, how about some great pictures of the man himself? Well all that and more can be […]
...moreThe Bohemian Manifesto
I think I was twelve when I first heard the word Bohemia. I didn’t really know what it meant but it conjured up a mist-drenched, mountainous region where men in long coats and women in peasant skirts sang the praises of Bacchus all night long in roadside taverns. Everyone had on either eyeliner or kohl, […]
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