A blow-by-blow unearthing of the places where the Beat writers first came to full bloom: the flat where Ginsberg wrote -Howl;- Gary Snyder's zen cottage in Berkeley; the ghostly railroad yards where Kerouac and -Cassady toiled; the pads where Jack & Neal & Carolyn lived; Ferlinghetti's favorite haunts. This meticulous guide also brings to light never-before-heard stories about Corso, Bob Kaufman, DiPrima, Kyger, Lamantia and other West Coast Beats. A entertaining read as well as a practical walking (and driving) tour that covers the entire Bay Area. With an introduction by Lawrence...

Over the course of an adventured-filled life, now in its tenth decade, Lawrence Ferlinghetti has been many things: a poet, painter, pacifist, publisher, courageous defender of free speech, and owner of San Francisco s legendary City Lights bookstore. Now the man whose A Coney Island of the Mind became a generational classic reveals yet another facet of his manifold talents, presenting here his travel journals, spanning over sixty years. Selected from a vast trove of mostly unpublished, handwritten notebooks, and edited by Giada Diano and Matthew Gleeson, Writing Across the...

Sensual and glimmering, Lorenzo Chiera s elliptical fragments evoke nights of bawdy excess in Trastevere ( City made of Roman ruins . . . / what a whorehouse ), translated here by one of the most renowned poets of our time.

In his preface, Lawrence Ferlinghetti describes the experience of reading Chiera for the first time: We soon realize we are in the presence of a savage erotic consciousness, as if the lust-driven senses were suddenly awakened out of a hoary sleep of a thousand years, a youth shaken awake by a rude medieval hand, senses still reeling, drunk in the hold of some...