Back issues of

Issue 12 is the last issue available of DHARMA beat (Spring 1999).    It was fun while it lasted. Back issues are available.

SAMPLE COPIES are available for $3.00. Back issues are available of the first 12 issues. (link to back issues)

Make checks payable to A. Gyenis.

Mail to:     A. Gyenis,  DHARMA beat, PO BOX 5174, Eureka, CA  95502-5174.  Thanks and enjoy,

Attila Gyenis   Editor     

The Kerouac Rag - This is a great small magazine from the UK that you should check out. This is a magazine that comes the old fashioned way, printed on paper. They now have an email address- al@alangriffey.freeserve.co.uk. The Kerouac Rag, Alan Griffey, 43 Chatto Road, Torquay, Devon TQ1 4HT, England. Subscriptions (4 issues): US - $20, UK - 8 pds.

Spirit - A Tribute to Jack Kerouac  -  Check this 2001 CD with some great music and spoken word, and help support the Lowell Celebrates Kerouac! committee.  With David Amram, Alan Crane, Lawrence Carradini, Steve Edington, Jim Dunleavy, Meg Smith and other friends. Available now by sending $15 to: Lowell Celebrates Kerouac!, PO Box 1111, Lowell, MA 01852

Doctor Sax and the Great World Snake - Screenplay by Jack Kerouac with 2 audio CD's. Illustrated by Richard Sala. (2003) This is the screenplay that Kerouac wrote based on Dr Sax, and the 2 CDs are a performance of the screenplay. Readers include Jim Carroll, Ellis Paul, Kate Pierson, Robert Creeley, Graham Parker, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Bill Janovitz and Robert Hunter. Music by Blue Note recording artist John Medeski. Comes with a foldout booklet that opens up to the 2 CDs and softcover screenplay.

OFFBEAT: Collaborating with Kerouac by David Amram.  Thunder's Mouth Press (320 pp.) $22.95    March 2002,   ISBN 1-56025-362-2. Check it out. The following is from Kirkus Reviews - From composer Amram (Vibrations, not reviewed) Offbeat is a pleasingly exuberant memoir of wildly creative and encouraging times performing with Jack Kerouac.

It's not so much an autobiography really as an unpretentious, freewheeling festival of highly diverting tales: the nights Amram and his beat buddy spent at the Five Spot and Bickford's and Circle-in-the-Square; their early improvisations, such as Orizaba 210 Blues; making Pull My Daisy with Alfred Leslie as their contribution to the New Cinema; the pleasures of working with lyric artists; the downtown life in New York City, "checking out old friends, rapping with strangers and hanging out in the style that was still the major source of Saturday night entertainment." But beyond telling some good stories, Amram wants to convey what his group of pals was all about, to get past the Beatniks as a merchandising trend and reveal their motivations. This never comes across as a lecture; Amram is too passionate for that, and he has a way with the patter: "We were told we were offbeat, but we felt we were on the case." Amram serves up Corso, Ginsberg, Orlovsky, and others as decidedly quirky but generous souls welcoming to the table everyone who had an open heart. They were looking for "the diamonds in the sidewalk," always "trying to catch lightning in a bottle," free spirits who took their creativity seriously, even if some realized too late that creativity was a "natural gift" that didn't require diving to the bottom of a bottle. Creative output would be their measure, not the limelight-- or as Gary Goodrow said, "If you stick to your principals long enough, you can successfully avoid being fashionable for the rest of your life." Amram includes stories about shows that used Kerouac material after he had died.

A piece of pure entertainment that also reveals the individuality of Amram's friends and gives the Beat stereotype its walking papers. (8 b.w. photos, not seen)

Jack Kerouac - Books of Dreams. This is a newly revised and expanded edition published by City Lights Books, issued in 2001. Check it out.

Beat Down to Your Soul - with an introduction and edited by Ann Charters. Penguin Books, June 5, 2001. $17.00. Poems, essays, memoirs, notes, protests, attacks, and apologies by the beats and about the beats. Includes all the usual suspects.

Door Wide Open, a Beat Love Affair in Letters, 1957-1958 - by Jack Kerouac and Joyce Johnson. Now available in paperback by Penguin Books. (June 5, 2001, $13.00) Gathers the letters and postcards which Kerouac and Glassman (now Johnson) exchanged.

The following beat related books are published by SIU Press, call (800) 346-2681 to order or visit you local independent bookstore.

Kerouac, The Word and the Way, Prose Artist as Spiritual Quester by Ben Giamo. "The book offers insights into Kerouac's life and writing. It is a detailed and comprehensive description of what Giamo calls the various spiritual quests undertaken by Kerouac - as revealed by his novelistic writings." Ann Charters. $34.95

Jack Kerouac's Duluoz Legend by James T. Jones. "Jones enlarges the reader's understanding of Kerouac by placing his work in a European and American literary context, and creating new critical categories by which to explore the issues at large in Kerouac's oeuvre. By regrouping the Kerouac texts, Jones offers new insights...another window into Kerouac's world." Regina Weinreich. $34.95

Mad to be Saved , the Beats, the 50s, and Film by David Sterritt. "David Sterritt has paid the Beats the double compliment of taking their ideas seriously and then embedding them in a whole zeitgeist full of cultural allies and enemies. The result is that the Beats take on an intellectual three-dimensionality such as one has never seen them exhibit before. This is a ground-breaking study, and a stimulating, energetically written on." Phillip Lopate. $29.95

The View from On The Road, The Rhetorical Vision of Jack Kerouac by Omar Swartz. "The author's style is clear, concise, and interesting. The author manages to cover ground that often encourages academic styles that are abstruse and awkward (i.e. post-modernism) in a manner that is both available to the general reader and to the professional critic." Ernest G. Bormann. $34.95 cloth, $17.95 paper.

A Map of Mexico City Blues by James. T. Jones. "Jones has done a rare thing: read Kerouac's poetry closely, and understood it as a seminal poetic work of the latter half of the American century." Allen Ginsberg. $26.95

A Clown in a Grave, Complexities and Tensions in the Works of Gregory Corso by Michael Skau. "In deft prose, Skau traces the main themes of Corso's work, exploring entirely new avenues in several chapters, and provides the first thorough bibliography (70 pages in length) in thirty years...Skau's book is a major achievement and ought to provide a point of entry for a deeper reading of Corso's work." Literary Research. $34.95

"ORPHEUS EMERGED", the first full-length work of fiction by Jack Kerouac to be published since the author's death in 1969, was published exclusively in digital format by LiveREADS on November 20, 2000 for $4.95. Completed in 1945 when Kerouac was 23 and signed his work "John", it exhibits a writer in the process of finding the voice that would eventually express the spirit of a generation. Now available in hardcover at your local independent bookstore.

The following list compiled by Dan Barth, May 10, 2000.

ATOP AN UNDERWOOD by Jack Kerouac. Edited by Paul Marion. Viking, 1999, 249 pp., $24.95. Early stories and other writings by the King of the Beats.

JACK KEROUAC: SELECTED LETTERS, 1957-1969. Edited by Ann Charters. Viking, 1999, 514 pp., $34.95. The second volume of Kerouac's correspondence with commentary by his first biographer.

BAGOMBO SNUFF BOX by Kurt Vonnegut. G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1999, 295 pp., $24.95. This is a collection of early Vonnegut stories, similar to those found in WELCOME TO THE MONKEY HOUSE. Previously uncollected.

GOD BLESS YOU, DR. KEVORKIAN by Kurt Vonnegut. Seven Stories Press, 2000, 79 pp., $18.00. The New York Times Book Review called this, " . . . an odd little volume that gathers 21 koanlike pieces."

AN UNFORTUNATE WOMAN by Richard Brautigan. St. Martins Press, 2000, 112 pp., $17.95. Late novel by the old hawkline monster, finished shortly before his death in 1984. Previously unpublished.

YOU CAN'T CATCH DEATH by Ianthe Brautigan. St. Martins Press, 2000, 176 pp., $24.95. A memoir by Brautigan's only child. Now 40 years old, she lives in Santa Rosa, California. She tells of her early days with the old man in San Francisco, Montana and elsewhere and attempts to come to terms with his suicide.

THE EDNA WEBSTER COLLECTION OF UNDISCOVERED WRITING by Richard Brautigan. Mariner Books, 1999, 160 pp., $12.00. Early prose and poetry. Previously unpublished.

THE RICHARD BRAUTIGAN AHHHHHHHHHHH by Rob McLennan. Stoddart Publishers, 2000, 96 pp., $10.95. No other information available as yet.

FIERCE INVALIDS HOME FROM HOT CLIMATES by Tom Robbins. Bantam, 2000, 432 pp., $27.50. New novel by the man who writes like Dolly Parton looks. Just out.

DELIBERATE PROSE by Allen Ginsberg. Edited by Bill Morgan. HarperCollins, 2000, 536 pp., $30.00. Selected essays by the angelheaded howler. This book was in the works when Ginsberg died. Includes essays on art, music, literature, sex, drugs, war, et cetera written between 1952 and 1995.

LAST WORDS: THE FINAL JOURNALS OF WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS. Edited by James Grauerholz. Grove Press, 2000, 256 pp., $25.00. Representative journal entries from the last months in the life of el hombre invisible.

...and last but not least, there is a new biography on John Kennedy Toole who wrote Confederacy of Dunces, which may or may not be the funniest book ever written.