'Skerl has gathered a collection of innovative essays that exemplify the most recent recontextualizations and reassessments of Beat Culture and its practitioners. Scholars and students of the field will find the familiar media stereotypes and cliches and the critical canons and legends about the Beats challenged and revisioned. Canonical Beat writers are resituated within a collective and interdisciplinary context where the influences of jazz, abstract impressionism and action painting , performance art, the international avant-gardes, and Buddhism are explored more vigorously than ever before. Critically overlooked African American and female Beat writers are not only recovered for serious analysis, but restored to the recognition they actually enjoyed within the movement itself. This welcome collection is a sophisticated and accessible resource for anyone interested in the aesthetics and politics of twentieth-century American counter-culture.' - Robin Lydenberg, author of Word Cultures: Radical Theory and Practice in William S. Burroughs' Fiction
'The beats refuse to be forgotten or ignored out of existence because the challenges they faced and the struggles they undertook, and not the solutions they tried to offer or the victories they sometimes claimed, remain very much our own: mind and matter, individual and collective, majority and minority, gender and race. The contributors to Jennie Skerl's Reconstructing the Beats, both the new voices and those already well-known, bring these challenges and struggles back to life for us by broadening our definition of who and what the Beats were and by deepening our understanding of exactly how and why they became so. This collection cannot fail to accelerate and intensify the ongoing and much-needed reappraisal of this consistently fascinating episode in contemporary cultural history.' - Timothy S. Murphy, University of Oklahoma, author of Wising Up the Marks: The Amodern William Burroughs
