Revelation and Prophecy Without FM: William S. Burroughs’s War on Control
Burroughs’s transgressive prose works aimed at naming and defeating demons. Language is a form of magic that can triumph over control.
NAB Communities Podcast Interview: Ellen Pearlman
Ellen Pearlman is a founder of The Brooklyn Rail and is affiliated with nine Utne Independent Press Awards. We ask Pearlman about her recent book, Nothing and Everything: The Influence of Buddhism on the American Avant-Garde.
February 1st declared “Neal Cassady Day”
The fourth annual 'Neal Cassady Birthday Bash' will be held at The Mercury Cafe in Cassady's hometown of Denver.
Kerouac’s Lost Movie
Ever since On the Road was published, sporadic attempts
to bring it to the screen have come to
nothing. Hollywood producers evidently saw the book's lack of a storyline with a limiting three-act
structure as a drawback. By the time Jack wrote On the Road in 1951, after five years of false starts, he was already in rebellion against conventional storytelling.
The Agent of Apathy
Over the last decade the cultural figure known as the “hipster” has increasingly turned into a target of scorn, despite an apparent disagreement over what the term means and to whom it refers. This semi-mythological character reveals our own compliance with barbaric totalitarianism, a fault we’ve been projecting onto others.
The Beat Hotel
On the run from the puritanical morality of 1950s America, beatniks Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Gregory Corso fled to the bohemian Left Bank of Paris. Now, a new film chronicles these freewheeling years of sex, drugs, and poetry. (Video)