Google Editions, the top-secret, soon-to-be-launched e-book label, has just inked a deal with the American Booksellers Association to become the primary source of e-books on hundreds of indie booksellers' websites.
Our newest Poet Laureate, W. S. Merwin, has made a point of living a quiet Buddhist's life out in Hawaii. It's wonderful then to imagine him brandishing a beer bottle and fending off the Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa and his bodyguards as the Tibetan guru tried to force Merwin and a girlfriend to strip during a drunken party. That was the scene thirty-five years ago, in what has become known as "The Great Naropa Poetry Wars," detailed in Tom Clark's book of the same name. As Merwin later said of the incident, "I was not going to go peacefully . . . I started hitting people with beer bottles. It was a very violent scene."
Bill Morgan, editor of the forthcoming volume Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters, chats with Granta about the process of editing the iconic duo and whether there are still any surprises about the Beat Generation to be found, and offers an online only excerpt from the book.
