If you haven’t had a chance to read our years-running updates on the the long-lost letter that greatly influenced the prose style of Jack Kerouac and On The Road, let… Read more »

Porter Square Books—a Cambridge, Massachusetts indie bookseller and dear friend of Melville House—has a problem. It’s an ongoing problem, and one shared by many booksellers: a very specific set of books keep… Read more »

Thursday, no two ways about it, is one of the slow days. With the week no longer young, and the promise of Friday still hanging elusively around the bend of… Read more »

I saw the best minds of my generation corresponding exuberantly. And by “exuberantly,” I mean “on speed.” One major influence on Jack Kerouac and the whole beat generation was a Benzedrine-fueled,… Read more »

For fifty years, Beat poet Gerd Stern has been blamed for discarding a letter that Jack Kerouac described as “the greatest piece of writing I ever saw,” a move that… Read more »

Great news! The Baffler, America’s favorite curmudgeonly left-wing magazine, has unearthed, excavated, and digitized its past. And what a past it is! All of The Baffler’s back issues (which have,… Read more »

Do you tell people you’re writing a novel? It might be better to go with something like, “I am trying to write a novel,” because if you are indeed tackling… Read more »

One would think that Hollywood bibliophiles would be flashy collectors, using the purchase receipts of valuable books to demonstrate some intellectual inner life that the tabloids usually strip them of.… 3 / Read more »

How about this for a delightful literary correspondence? In 1961, Electric Literature tells us, Groucho Marx received a request for a portrait from none other than T.S. Eliot. Presumably slightly bemused… Read more »

If you’re in New York and for some ungodly reason find yourself in midtown, you might want to swing by The Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound on the… 2 / Read more »