Jan Herman

Here we go again. To mark the resumption of our long nightmare, my staff of thousands thought it apt to repost this from 2017: On the day he is sworn in as the preening el presidente of a tin-pot United States of Trumpistan, enabling him to run the country like a division of his family-held company, Thin Man Press will release American Porn, a collection of "investigative poems about American history, culture and politics" by Heathcote Williams.

As part of the Beat Hotel crowd in Paris during the late-1950s and early '60s, Sinclair Beiles collaborated on the first book of avant-garde cut-ups, "Minutes to Go," with Brion Gysin, William Burroughs, and Gregory Corso. While working at Maurice Girodias's Paris-based Olympia Press, he was a key editor who helped shepherd Burroughs's "Naked Lunch" into print. It is his incandescent poetry, however, for which he should be most remembered. But despite praise for his poetry from such luminaries as Burroughs and Leonard Cohen, his verse has rarely surfaced outside the small-press literary world. "Catastrophes Choisies" is Beiles's first poetry collection to appear in French.

A strong new issue of Beat Scene has just arrived from the U.K. Although the magazine is primarily devoted to the leading lights of the Beat Generation writers, the magazine covers many who were contemporaneous but not really part of their circle, as well as others who preceded them. Nor does it stint on writers who have followed in their wake. The unifying element that draws the magazine's interest seems to be that they lived and breathed and created their work outside the academy. And while many of their books have now been accepted into the canon, they are hardly academic.