During the past year Paul McCartney has been in the public's eye more than at any time since the peak of Beatlemania over thirty years ago. His fans have been treated to the best-selling Flaming Pie and Standing Stone albums, a full hour of Paul on "Oprah," and this thoughtful and comprehensive biography that brings us closer to the man than ever before. Based on hundreds of hours of exclusive interviews over a period of five years, and with complete access to Paul's own archives, Barry Miles has succeeded in letting Paul tell the story of his life as a Beatle in his own words. It includes Paul's recollection of the genesis of every song that he wrote with John Lennon and the fascinating details about their remarkable collaboration.

Since its original publication in Paris in 1959, Naked Lunch has become one of the most important novels of the twentieth century. Exerting its influence on the relationship of art and obscenity, it is one of the books that redefined not just literature but American culture. For the Burroughs enthusiast and the neophyte, this volume--that contains final-draft typescripts, numerous unpublished contemporaneous writings by Burroughs, his own later introductions to the book, and his essay on psychoactive drugs--is a valuable and fresh experience of a novel that has lost none of its relevance or satirical bite.

Called "a vivid picture of literary life along the Left Bank in the late 1950s and early 1960s . . . [and] fun reading" by Library Journal, The Beat Hotel is a delightful chronicle of a remarkable moment in American literary history. From the Howl obscenity trial to the invention of the cut-up technique, Barry Miles's extraordinary narrative chronicles the feast of ideas that was Paris, where the Beats took awestruck audiences with Duchamp and Celine, and where some of their most important work came to fruition -- Ginsberg's "Kaddish" and "To Aunt Rose"; Corso's The Happy Birthday of Death; and Burroughs's Naked Lunch. Based on firsthand accounts from diaries, letters, and many original interviews, The Beat Hotel is an intimate look at a place that, the San Francisco Chronicle has written, "gave the spirit of Dean Moriarty and the genius of Genet and Duchamp a place to dream together of new worlds over a glass of vin ordinaire".

Authoritative biography of cult writer and author of NAKED LUNCH, William Burroughs (1914-1997). It has been 50 years since Norman Mailer asserted, 'I think that William Burroughs is the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius.' This assessment holds true today. No-one since then has taken such risks in their writing, developed such individual radical political ideas, or spanned such a wide range of media - Burroughs has written novels, memoirs, technical manuals and poetry, he has painted, made collages, taken thousands of photographs, made visual scrapbooks, produced hundreds of hours of experimental tapes, acted in movies and recorded more CDs than most rock groups. Made a cult figure by the publication of NAKED LUNCH, Burroughs was a mentor to the 1960s youth culture. Underground papers referred to him as 'Uncle Bill' and he ranked alongside Bob Dylan and the Beatles, Buckminster Fuller and R.D. Laing as one of the 'gurus' of the youth movement who might just have the secret of the universe. Based upon extensive research, this biography paints a new portrait of Burroughs, making him real to the reader and showing how he was perceived by his contemporaries in all his guises - from icily distant to voluble drunk. It shows how his writing was very much influenced by his life situation and by the people he met on his travels around America and Europe. He was, beneath it all, a man torn by emotions: his guilt at not visiting his doting mother; his despair at not responding to reconciliation attempts from his father; his distance from his brother; the huge void that separated him from his son; and above all his killing of his wife, Joan Vollmer.

A new preface by the author updates this reissue of a seminal biography of the counter culture icon, by a luminary of the 1960s underground Allen Ginsberg occupies a significant and enduring position in American literature. Following Ginsberg's death in 1997, Barry Miles has drawn on both his long friendship with the poet and on Ginsberg's journals and correspondence to produce an immensely detailed and fascinating account of one of the 20th century's most extraordinary poets.

'Fear makes me a writer, fear and a lack of confidence' Charles Bukowski chronicled the seedy underside of the city in which he spent most of his life, Los Angeles. His heroes were the panhandlers and hustlers, the drunks and the hookers, his beat the racetracks and strip joints and his inspiration a series of dead-end jobs in warehouses, offices and factories. It was in the evenings that he would put on a classical record, open a beer and begin to type... Brought up by a violent father, Bukowski suffered childhood beatings before developing horrific acne and withdrawing into a moody adolescence. Much of his young life epitomised the style of the Beat generation - riding Greyhound buses, bumming around and drinking himself into a stupor. During his lifetime he published more than forty-five books of poetry and prose, including the novels Post Office, Factotum, Women and Pulp. His novels sold millions of copies worldwide in dozens of languages. In this definitive biography Barry Miles, celebrated author of Jack Kerouac: King of the Beats, turns his attention to the exploits of this hard-drinking, belligerent wild man of literature.