Book of Blues
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Narrated by:
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Andrew Eiden
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By:
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Jack Kerouac
About this listen
From the acclaimed Beat Generation author of On the Road and The Dharma Bums come eight extended poems in which he reflects on the urban settings he finds himself in.
Best known for his novels, Jack Kerouac is also an important poet. In these poems, Kerouac writes from the heart of experience in the music of language, employing the same instrumental blues and jazz forms that he used in another book of poems, Mexico City Blues.
The poems included here, written between 1954 and 1961, are:
• “San Francisco Blues”
• “Richmond Hill Blues”
• “Bowery Blues”
• “MacDougal Street Blues”
• “Desolation Blues”
• “Orizaba 210 Blues”
• “Orlanda Blues”
• “Cerrada Medellin Blues”
The author explains his musical influences and the self-imposed length of the poems: “In my system, the form of blues choruses is limited by the small page of the breastpocket notebook in which they are written, like the form of a set number of bars in a jazz blues chorus, and so sometimes the word-meaning can carry from one chorus into another, or not, just like the phrase-meaning can carry harmonically from one chorus to another, or not, in jazz, so that, in these blues as in jazz, the form is determined by time, and by the musician’s spontaneous phrasing & harmonizing with the beat of time as if waves & waves on by in measured choruses.”—Jack Kerouac
Book of Blues is an exuberant foray into language and consciousness, rich with imagery, propelled by rhythm, and based in a reverent attentiveness to the moment.
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By: Jack Kerouac
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Overall
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Story
This novella tells the story of a ten-year-old Black boy named Pictorial Review “Pic” Jackson, who lives with his grandfather in North Carolina in the 1940s. After his grandfather dies and Pic is living with another relative, his older brother, Slim, shows up to take him out of that dysfunctional home, and they journey from the rural South to New York City. They head for Harlem, where Slim lives with his girlfriend and where Pic sees firsthand the economic hard times his brother is experiencing. After losing job after job, Slim sends his pregnant girlfriend off to San Francisco.
By: Jack Kerouac
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- By: Jack Kerouac
- Narrated by: Andrew Eiden
- Length: 2 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A long poem in Kerouac’s freewheeling and spontaneous improvisational style, Mexico City Blues is a unique epic of sound, rhythm, and religion. Called superb sensory meditations, the poetry takes in life, death, and spirituality but roams widely across continents and cultures. Memories, fantasies, dreams, and surrealistic free association are all lyrically combined in the loose format inspired by jazz and the blues.
By: Jack Kerouac
-
Desolation Angels
- A Novel
- By: Jack Kerouac
- Narrated by: Andrew Eiden
- Length: 14 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Originally published in 1965, this autobiographical novel covers a key year in Jack Kerouac’s life—the period that led up to the publication of On the Road in September of 1957. After spending two months in the summer of 1956 as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak in the North Cascade Mountains of Washington, Kerouac’s fictional self Jack Duluoz comes down from the isolated mountains to the wild excitement of the bars, jazz clubs, and parties of San Francisco, before traveling on to Mexico City, New York, Tangiers, Paris, and London.
By: Jack Kerouac
-
Scattered Poems
- By: Jack Kerouac
- Length: 1 hr
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Just as he upended the conventions of the novel with On the Road, Jack Kerouac revolutionized American poetry in this ingenious collection. Bringing together selections from literary journals and his private notebooks, Jack Kerouac’s Scattered Poems exemplifies the Beat Generation icon’s innovative approach to language. Kerouac’s poems, populated by hitchhikers, Chinese grocers, Buddhist saints, and cultural figures from Rimbaud to Harpo Marx, evoke the primal and the sublime, the everyday and the metaphysical.
By: Jack Kerouac
-
Atop an Underwood
- Early Stories and Other Writings
- By: Jack Kerouac, Paul Marion - editor introduction
- Narrated by: Andrew Eiden, Bronson Pinchot
- Length: 8 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Before Jack Kerouac expressed the spirit of a generation in his 1957 classic On the Road, he spent years figuring out how he wanted to live and, above all, learning how to write. Atop an Underwood brings together more than sixty previously unpublished works that Kerouac wrote before he was twenty-two, ranging from stories and poems to plays and parts of novels, including an excerpt from his 1943 merchant marine novel, The Sea Is My Brother. These writings reveal what Kerouac was thinking, doing, and dreaming during his formative years and reflect his primary literary influences.
By: Jack Kerouac, and others
-
Lonesome Traveler
- By: Jack Kerouac
- Narrated by: Andrew Eiden
- Length: 6 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In his first autobiographical work, Jack Kerouac reveals exhilarating stories of the years he spent traveling, while writing his acclaimed novels. His journeys took him from California deserts crisscrossed by train tracks to the bullfights of Mexico to the Beat nightlife of New York City and across the Atlantic to Paris, Morocco, and London. He also writes about relationship, jobs, and the nature of life on the road. Here are echoes of landscapes that appear in some of his novels, including The Dharma Bums and Desolation Angels.
By: Jack Kerouac