Actor and fiction writer Ethan Hawke narrates this classic novel with anarchic joy. He brings just the right slant, pace, and tone to this portrait of the 1950s Beat Generation. His narration exhibits the unrestrained enthusiasm that emanates from this autobiographical fiction. Protagonist Ray Smith (Kerouac’s alter ego) studies Buddhism, befriends characters who are based on the poets Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg, and takes in the San Francisco poetry scene when not riding the rails or hitchhiking around the country. Hawkes immerses himself and the listener in the text, capturing the stream-of-consciousness prose. While some of the party scenes and the male chauvinism may seem dated, the sense of adventure and spiritual seeking never falters. A.D.M. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine
We tend to imagine writers falling into two camps: hard-drinking misfits who somehow translate their personal misery into beautiful works, and buttoned-up academics with glasses perched soberly on the ends of their noses. While normally stereotypes should be deprecated, in this case there’s some truth to them: there certainly have been authors in the Tolkien mold, puffing […]
In Void Trip, writer Ryan O’Sullivan, artist Plaid Klaus, and letterer Aditya Bidikar have taken the template of the all-American, ’60s-era hippy road-trip, launched it into space and used it to dive into some impressively dark and philosophical territory. Ryan and Klaus were good enough to talk to us about the just-out book, published by Image […]