Here are 36 books that Visions of Cody fans have personally recommended if you like
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Poetry is language at its most condensed and pure, potent and direct—the closest thing to thought. At its best, this mode and method is cinematic and penetrates like a powerful dream, and bringing it to narrative prose in a legend and key that can be woven together, like a tapestry, has been my lifework. Nothing in this list is ancient or even old, nor is any of it new—I've picked all books from the 20th century, because that was the world and writing that immediately influenced me, it's long enough past to be settled and safely buried, but still new enough to have some currency with the life and language of now.
I was so overwhelmed by the perfection of this American masterwork that I sought out the founder of The Thomas Wolfe Society, the greatest Thomas Wolfe collector who ever lived and who will ever live, and became his very close friend.
This is a huge book, with the music of pitch-perfect prosody from beginning to end, and yet it's only part of a much greater whole—every one of Wolfe's books connect together in some way, forming a massive cadency of music in words. If you examine them, there's only two main branches (Eugene Gant as the protagonist in one, and Monk Webber as the protagonist in the other). But it's really all one big expanding fable. This volume has, in my opinion, the richest writing, from the opening proem to the tiny diamond-sharp moving-picture painting of the final line.
The sequel to Thomas Wolfe's remarkable first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, Of Time and the River is one of the great classics of American literature. The book chronicles the maturing of Wolfe's autobiographical character, Eugene Gant, in his desperate search for fulfillment, making his way from small-town North Carolina to the wider world of Harvard University, New York City, and Europe. In a massive, ambitious, and boldly passionate novel, Wolfe examines the passing of time and the nature of the creative process, as Gant slowly but ecstatically embraces the urban life, recognizing it as a necessary ordeal for the birth…
Poetry is language at its most condensed and pure, potent and direct—the closest thing to thought. At its best, this mode and method is cinematic and penetrates like a powerful dream, and bringing it to narrative prose in a legend and key that can be woven together, like a tapestry, has been my lifework. Nothing in this list is ancient or even old, nor is any of it new—I've picked all books from the 20th century, because that was the world and writing that immediately influenced me, it's long enough past to be settled and safely buried, but still new enough to have some currency with the life and language of now.
Everything F. Scott Fitzgerald ever touched with his pen glimmered and was gold. Just think of Tender Is the Night—the title comes from Keats, and Keats is the living lyre, and it's a fine, long book that haunts you. But the place where I first entered his world is the fat blue collected stories that came out in 1989, edited by my late friend Dr. Matthew J. Bruccoli.
This was the book that first made me see that gorgeous writing was everything, that it was the mode and method and the way. Every one of the stories in this gigantic book has something in it that is sensitive and evocative and lives beyond its page and time.
A collection of 43 short stories by the author of "The Great Gatsby" and "Tender is the Night". The text contains tales such as "May Day" and "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz".
Christmas, it’s often said, is a time for family, so I asked my son to answer this one for me: "He’s an all-right dad, but sometimes he’s really annoying. His most annoying habit is foraging for things in hedges. His books are actually quite good. He’s good about driving me to places. The dog loveshim.He really likes Christmas. His best Christmas habit is that he loves Christmas trees, but he never wants to put them up as early as everyone else, then he always makes us keep them up till Twelfth Night."
I read this book aloud every Christmas (my son still lets me) and the rhythms of the language never lose their magic. The writer’s memories of the Christmas Days of his childhood are vividly drawn and have an enduring, innocent appeal. “Years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales…”
Dylan Thomas's classic account of his childhood Christmases, with full colour illustrations by Peter Bailey. The special gift edition for Thomas's centenary now in paperback, with a beautiful gold-foiled cover.
All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street...
Dylan Thomas's lyrical account of his childhood Christmases in a small Welsh town, featuring wolves, bears, hippos and Mrs Prothero's cat, has become deservedly famous. This re-designed edition celebrates the centenary of his birth, and features full colour artwork from illustrator Peter Bailey.
Poetry is language at its most condensed and pure, potent and direct—the closest thing to thought. At its best, this mode and method is cinematic and penetrates like a powerful dream, and bringing it to narrative prose in a legend and key that can be woven together, like a tapestry, has been my lifework. Nothing in this list is ancient or even old, nor is any of it new—I've picked all books from the 20th century, because that was the world and writing that immediately influenced me, it's long enough past to be settled and safely buried, but still new enough to have some currency with the life and language of now.
This fine coming-of-age novel was originally published in two big red volumes. It's large and reads like an enormous European tapestry laid out in some cold castle museum, with vivid dyes and a thousand patterned intricacies to ponder. It was a literary sensation when it was published, a favorite of the young romantics of the WWI generation, and Mackenzie followed it up with several branching-off sequels. He writes with such vividry that the dusky London streets and country cottages in this book are fresh and living even now. This book affected a young F. Scott Fitzgerald so much that in the early drafts of Fitz's first novel, he actually copped the name of the protagonist of this book.
Sinister Street is a novel about growing up, and concerns two children, Michael Fane and his sister Stella have throught their young life. Both of them are born out of wedlock, something which was frowned upon at the time, but from rich parents. The novel had several sequels, which continue until Michael Fane's marriage.
I’ve been obsessed with travel and novels that feature travel in the narrative since my early teens. A near-death experience at the age of nineteen, forced me to confront my own limited life experiences and encouraged me to travel the globe and see some of the world we live in before it was too late, as there’s nothing worse than too late. Also growing up on an inner city council estate instilled a desire to escape the urban environment and international travel and travel writing satisfied those compelling urges.
Although not a book about travel I feel this book fits the list, as it is essentially an extended love letter to both Jack Kerouac and Neil Cassady, who at certain stages in her life, were the lovers of the author. What this book also describes is how people who decide to stay at home, while their lovers and friends embark on endless road trips, survive the ordinary hardships of day-to-day living. The book is incredibly insightful and sheds new light on the lives of the aforementioned famous Beat Generation authors. It also warns that the perils of living in the moment, fast time, no responsibilities, does not always lead to a long and happy life. As I discovered during my own extensive travels, if you stay on the road too long, you might not be able to find your way home.
The wife of Neal Cassady describes her life in the American Beat subculture, her marriage to Cassady and love affair with Jack Kerouac, and her relationship with Allen Ginsberg. Reprint.
I’ve been a street musician, set up kindergartens, worked in special needs education, and run wood-fired showers in a field for meditation retreats. I’m also associate professor of sociology at the National University of Ireland Maynooth. I became a Buddhist partly out of interest in a very different culture and started wondering how Buddhism got from Asia to the West. I think about this through my own experience of teaching meditation, being an activist for 35 years, living in five countries, and learning ten languages: what do you have to do to make an idea come alive in a different culture?
One of the first places I heard about Buddhism was through Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Gary Snyder. The joy of reading Kerouac has worn off a bit, but Snyder and Ginsberg have become lifetime companions and real sources of inspiration for me, not least in their engagement with Buddhism. This collection of poems, essays, letters, and other writings brings them together with a much wider range of writers – Diane di Prima and Philip Whalen, Anne Waldman and Kenneth Rexroth, William Burroughs and Lawrence Ferlinghetti – showing how the best minds of two generations heard, felt and responded to Buddhism in their many different ways. It’s a real treasure-house of words.
Essays, poems, photographs, and letters explore the link between Buddhism and the Beats--with previously unpublished material from several beat writers, including Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, and Diane diPrima.
I started travelling to paint and draw when I was an art student, first in Manchester and then at the Royal College of Art in London. I applied for drawing scholarships to help enable my travels. I wanted to see and draw the world in my own way. I’ve never really liked reading travel guidebooks. They date so quickly and can be too limiting but I’ve always enjoyed reading books by people who travel. You get a much truer sense of a place from someone who has followed a passion to somewhere remote. When I travel I look for stories on my journeys, something to bring home.
This is the bible for the Beat generation and a glimpse into the jazz poetry road trip art world of 1950s America.
I read it before travelling to the US on a scholarship to help give me a sense of the Americana and youth culture I hope I would find.
I travelled all around the States excited by motels and road signs and railroad stations and telegraph poles laden with cables running off to disappear over the horizon. And those big old cars…
It’s such a physical story, so full of vigour and sweat.
The legendary novel of freedom and the search for authenticity that defined a generation, now in a striking new Pengiun Classics Deluxe Edition
Inspired by Jack Kerouac's adventures with Neal Cassady, On the Road tells the story of two friends whose cross-country road trips are a quest for meaning and true experience. Written with a mixture of sad-eyed naivete and wild ambition and imbued with Kerouac's love of America, his compassion for humanity, and his sense of language as jazz, On the Road is the quintessential American vision of freedom and hope, a book that changed American literature and changed…
Seth Wynes is a climate researcher studying how everyday people can fight climate change more effectively. His work has been featured in media outlets from around the world including The New York Times, NPR, and The Guardian. Before pursuing an academic career, Seth was a high school science teacher in England and Northern Quebec, and still draws inspiration for his research from the questions and concerns raised by his students. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada.
“The little flowers grew everywhere around the rocks, and no one had asked them to grow, or me to grow.” The joy in Kerouac is stumbling along with his absent-minded musings and finding the stretches of poetry that really speak to you. Dharma Bums is spiritual and inward-focused, but the characters spend time in nature, trying to figure out their place in it. It’s the kind of companion that you want to have with you on a canoe trip or sharing space with you on a hammock on a warm fall day.
Published just one year after "On The Road", this is the story of two men enganged in a passionate search for Dharma or truth. Their major adventure is the pursuit of the Zen Way, which takes them climbing into the High Sierras to seek the lesson of solitude.
Belden Lane is a wilderness backpacker and storyteller who has written extensively on the connections between human spiritual experience and the power of place. As Professor Emeritus of Theological Studies at Saint Louis University he taught theology and spirituality for thirty-five years with the Jesuits. Drawing on backpacking trips in the canyonlands of Utah, the Wind River Range of Wyoming, and the Australian outback, his books include Landscapes of the Sacred, Backpacking with the Saints: Wilderness Hiking as Spiritual Practice, and The Great Conversation: Nature and the Care of the Soul.
A Buddhist activist and Pulitzer Prize-winning beat generation poet, Snyder celebrates “wildness” as a moral principle. It gives value to the living world and invites us to the wild places within, the inner wilderness that carries us beyond the comforting assurances of the mind. He cautions against looking for metaphorical and spiritual meanings “beyond and through” the natural world. This risks our not “seeing what is before our very eyes: plain thusness” … which in itself is more than enough to astound!
"This is an important book for anyone interested in the ethical interrelationships of things, places, and people, and it is a book that is not just read but taken in." ―Library Journal
Featuring a new introduction by Robert Hass, the nine captivatingly meditative essays in The Practice of the Wild display the deep understanding and wide erudition of Gary Snyder in the ways of Buddhist belief, wildness, wildlife, and the world. These essays, first published in 1990, stand as the mature centerpiece of Snyder’s work and thought, and this profound collection is widely accepted as one of the central texts…
My name is Bri Bruce, writing as B. L. Bruce, and am an award-winning poet and Pushcart prize nominee from California. Over the last decade and a half, my work has appeared in dozens of literary publications. I am the author of four books and Editor-in-Chief of nature-centric magazineHumana Obscura. I was raised with a wildlife biologist/avid gardener for a mother and a forestry major/backpacker/fisherman as a father. Both my parents instilled in me at a young age a love of nature. A lifetime spent outdoors inspires my work—so much so that I’ve been called a “poetic naturalist” and the “heiress of Mary Oliver.”
While Jack Kerouac can arguably be synonymous with the Beat generation, the poems in this collection reveal a lesser-known and seldom seen but poignant side of Kerouac’s legacy. He distills his surroundings into short vignettes, reminiscent of the Beat style and motif, but incorporates a significant amount of nature imagery. They’re beautiful glimpses of the world through the eyes of one of America’s most influential authors.
Above all, a haiku must be very simple and free of all poetic trickery and make a little picture and yet be as airy and graceful as a Vivaldi pastorella.' Jack Kerouac. Renowned for his groundbreaking Beat Generation novel "On the Road", Jack Kerouac was also a master of the haiku, the three-line, seventeen-syllable Japanese poetic form. Following in the tradition of Basho, Buson, Shiki, Issa, and other poets, Kerouac experimented with this centuries-old genre, taking it beyond strict syllable counts into what he believed was the form's essence. He incorporated his 'American' haiku in novels and in his correspondence,…
