Allen Ginsberg. William S. Burroughs. LeRoi Jones. Theirs are the names primarily associated with the Beat Generation. But what about Joyce Johnson (nee Glassman), Edie Parker, Elise Cowen, Diane Di Prima, and dozens of others? These female friends and lovers of the famous iconoclasts are now beginning to be recognized for their own roles in forging the Beat movement and for their daring attempts to live as freely as did the men in their circle a decade before Women's Liberation.Twenty-one-year-old Joyce Johnson, an aspiring novelist and a secretary at a New York literary agency, fell in love with Jack Kerouac on a blind date arranged by Allen Ginsberg nine months before the publication of On the Road made Kerouac an instant celebrity. While Kerouac traveled to Tangiers, San Francisco, and Mexico City, Johnson roamed the streets of the East Village, where she found herself in the midst of the cultural revolution the Beats had created. Minor Characters portrays the turbulent years of her relationship with Kerouac with extraordinary wit and love and a cool, critical eye, introducing the reader to a lesser known but purely original American voice: her own.

    Based on interviews with former members Lou Reed, John Cale, and Sterling Morrison, as well as others from Andy Warhol's circle of artistic collaborators, Up-Tight is the definitive oral and visual history of the band and its revolutionary, often avant-garde music. Bockris and Malanga's intelligent and entertaining approach-which does not shy away from the drugs, sleaze, and controversy that enveloped the band seemingly from its inception-provides compulsive reading.

    This guide to New York provides background history and expert descriptions of museums, parks, buildings, neighbourhoods and landmarks as well as detailed walking tours throughout Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx and Staten Island.

    Rare contemporary photos and engravings, accompanied by extensive, detailed captions, recall construction, human drama, politics, much more. 167 black-and-white illustrations.

    His diary of his early years, The Paris Diary and the New York Diary, was widely acclaimed. The Later Diaries continues one of the most sustained efforts in the intimate journal form ever undertaken and offers candid insights into his astonishing life, career, art, friendships, and love. In these years, Lions, Miss Julie, and Poems of Love and the Rain were composed and most of his books written; he also continued to meet the famous and infamous and to write of them with the charm that Janet Flanner characterized as "worldly, intelligent, licentious, highly indiscreet."

    Goode and his alliance of fellow pushers work their trade amidst students, businessmen, and assorted sewer rats while avoiding the law. Narrated from the separate perspectives of each member of the gang, "The Washington Square Ensemble" follows the twisted paths that have led the seven men through the grittyNew York underworld and towards a fragile alliance at Washington Square. With humor, compassion, and an uncanny ear for voices of the streets, Madison Smartt Bell delivers a stunning indictment--and occasional celebration--of a blighted New York landscape.

    In this memoir she describes in witty, spontaneous and idiosyncratic prose her life as one of seven siblings in a Catholic family in Northern Ireland.