Junky

by William S. Burroughs That Jack Black’s You Can’t Win influenced Junky in a significant way, it becomes an interesting exercise to read both for comparison’s sake. You catch hints of similarity between the two, although Burroughs’ book doesn’t necessarily compare favourably to Black’s. Both concern an individual navigating the American underworld, with stronger storytelling…
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Kata Hodos

by Douglas Livingston If you’re anything close to a regular reader of my reviews, you probably caught a bit of my love of Beat literature, and you can probably imagine my excitement when I discovered that we had something of a Beat poet right here in Thunder Bay. Of course, while I have had the…
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Howl and Other Poems

by Allen Ginsberg While I’ve spent a great deal of time sampling the likes of great Beat prose, I hadn’t really encountered any of the poetry, unless you want to count tiny snippets included in The Dharma Bums. As such, I figured Howl and Other Poems was probably the place to start; I was most…
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The Dharma Bums

by Jack Kerouac There’s something inexplicably beautiful in Kerouac’s spontaneous prose. It sometimes contains dated jargon, awkward phrases, and run-on sentences, but there’s this raw clarity in his descriptions that I find so endearing. While the author’s writing in The Dharma Bums may not have touched me as consistently as that of On the Road,…
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Naked Lunch

by William S. Burroughs Naked Lunch should be thought of less as a book and more as an undertaking. It took me multiple attempts to trudge through the “narrative” and actually––I assume––somewhat walk away with a bit of understanding of what I witnessed. I will also admit that the humour passed me by more-or-less unnoticed…
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On The Road

by Jack Kerouac Hearing, in passing, of a relationship between Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, I made the foolish assumption that On the Road would remind me of Naked Lunch. So it should come as no surprise that I was startled to see that Kerouac’s novel is nothing of the sort, with a wide-eyed,…
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