Stephen Bett's last three books (High-Maintenance, Nota Bene and, here, Three Women) have moved from his customary scathing satirizations of so-called pop culture to a deeply anguished book about a difficult love relationship to, now, a book of anger, bitterness, and new beginnings.

The legendary 1951 scroll draft of On the Road, published word for word as Kerouac originally composed it Though Jack Kerouac began thinking about the novel that was to become On the Road as early as 1947, it was not until three weeks in April 1951, in an apartment on West Twentieth Street in Manhattan, that he wrote the first full draft that was satisfactory to him. Typed out as one long, single-spaced paragraph on eight long sheets of tracing paper that he later taped together to form a 120 foot scroll, this document is among the most significant, celebrated, and provocative artifacts in contemporary American literary history. It represents the first full expression of Kerouac’s revolutionary aesthetic, the identifiable point at which his thematic vision and narrative voice came together in a sustained burst of creative energy. It was also part of a wider vital experimentation in the American literary, musical, and visual arts in the post-World War II period. It was not until more than six years later, and several new drafts, that Viking published, in 1957, the novel known to us today. On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of On the Road, Viking will publish the 1951 scroll in a standard book format. The differences between the two versions are principally ones of significant detail and altered emphasis. The scroll is slightly longer and has a heightened linguistic virtuosity and a more sexually frenetic tone. It also uses the real names of Kerouac’s friends instead of the fictional names he later invented for them. The transcription of the scroll was done by Howard Cunnell who, along with Joshua Kupetz, George Mouratidis, and Penny Vlagopoulos, provides a critical introduction that explains the fascinating compositional and publication history of On the Road and anchors the text in its historical, political, and social context.

Fifty timeless novels in one collection, plus additional bonus classics: The Oresteia by Aeschylus Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa Little Women by Louisa May Alcott The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri Between Past and Future by Hannah Arendt and Jerome Kohn Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum Around the World in Seventy-Two Days and Other Writings by Nellie Bly The Brontë Sisters by Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anne Brontë Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin The Spy by James Fenimore Cooper Great Expectations by Charles Dickens Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas The Psychopathology of Everyday Life by Sigmund Freud The Iliad by Homer The Odyssey by Homer The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson Niels Lyhne by Jens Peter Jacobsen On the Road: The Original Scroll by Jack Kerouac Tristes Tropiques by Claude Levi-Strauss The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and Other Stories by Jack London The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories by H. P. Lovecraft The Moon and Sixpence by W. Somerset Maugham Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham All My Sons by Arthur Miller The Crucible by Arthur Miller Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller A View from the Bridge by Arthur Miller Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe by Fernando Pessoa Twelve Angry Men by Reginald Rose The Theory of Moral Sentiments by Adam Smith Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights by John Steinbeck East of Eden by John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck The Short Novels of John Steinbeck by John Steinbeck Of Mice and Men and The Moon Is Down by John Steinbeck Dracula by Bram Stoker Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton Three Novels of New York by Edith Wharton Gray When You Are Old by William Butler Yeats We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

In the past twenty years, as the structures of Canadian culture have begun to change, so has the fate of As For Me and My House.

The House That Jack Built collects for the first time the four historic talks given by controversial poet Jack Spicer just before his early death in 1965. These lively and provocative lectures function as a gloss to Spicer's own poetry, a general discourse on poetics, and a cautionary handbook for young poets. This long-awaited document of Spicer's unorthodox poetic vision, what Robin Blaser has called "the practice of outside," is an authoritative edition of an underground classic. Peter Gizzi's afterword elucidates some of the fundamental issues of Spicer's poetry and lectures, including the concept of poetic dictation, which Spicer renovates with vocabularies of popular culture: radio, Martians, and baseball; his use of the California landscape as a backdrop for his poems; and his visual imagination in relation to the aesthetics of west-coast funk assemblage. This book delivers a firsthand account of the contrary and turbulent poetics that define Spicer's ongoing contribution to an international avant-garde.