Short Stories/Novellas

In 1955 novelist Jack Kerouac detoured from his cross-country American travels to Mexico City where a group of junkie expatriates he had known from the New York City post-War scene had gone for the cheap and plentiful supply of heroin and morphine. Fellow Beat writer William S. Burroughs, who had been a part of the Mexican expatriate community, had introduced Kerouac to Bill Garver (named Old Bull Gaines in the novel), a much-older long-term addict who had in turn introduced Kerouac to Esperanza Villanueva, whom Kerouac named Tristessa in the novel. Kerouac fell under the spell of Esperanza’s dark allure and exotic surroundings and hoped to re-experience the “fellaheen nights” of his joyous adventures with Mexicans in his past. Esperanza/Tristessa, however, proved to be a far more troubled and contentious companion than Kerouac had bargained for. Kerouac had entered a particularly contemplative time in his life—he had discovered an inner peace through Zen Buddhism and was practicing an ascetic lifestyle that included celibacy—a choice he later regretted. Although Kerouac managed to control his alcoholic tendencies much of the time in Mexico, Tristessa sank deeper and deeper into the belly of morphine addiction. Kerouac returned to Mexico City a year later (1956) hoping to resume his platonic friendship with Tristessa and perhaps even pursuing a physical relationship with her only to find a desperately junk-sick, emaciated Tristessa who could barely function. Shocked, disappointed, and largely ignored by his brown-skinned goddess, Kerouac left Tristessa trembling and barely coherent, taking only his notebooks and memories from the unpleasant experience. Blending his incandescent, highly-evocative, careening prose with alternately blissful and rueful meditations based on his Zen and Catholic teachings, Jack Kerouac in Tristessa documents a painful episode in the beatest of his Beat style.

The first novella in Jack Kerouac's Duluoz Legend, detailing the writer’s early life as refracted through the prism of the untimely loss of his brother “The earliest and most heartfelt chapter of Kerouac’s fictionalized autobiography.”—Ann Charters “His life . . . ended when he was nine and the nuns of St. Louis de France Parochial School were at his bedside to take down his dying words because they’d heard his astonishing revelations of heaven delivered in catechism on no more encouragement than it was his turn to speak.” Unique among Jack Kerouac’s novels, Visions of Gerard captures the scenes and sensations of earliest childhood, the first four years in the life of Ti Jean Duluoz as they unfold in the short, tragic-happy life of his brother, Gerard. Set in Kerouac’s hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts, childhood’s intensity, innocence, suffering, and delight unfold as Gerard interacts with animals, has visions of Our Lady in heaven, astonishes the priest in the church confessional, and observes his family as they laugh and drink and weep—that is, when he isn’t sick and confined to bed. A novel that Kerouac called “my best most serious sad and true book yet,” Visions of Gerard is a beautiful, unsettling, and melancholic exploration of the meaning and precariousness of existence.