And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks [Library Binding]

9781433249112: And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks [Library Binding]
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More than sixty years ago, William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, two novice writers at the dawn of their careers, sat down to write a novel about the summer of 1944, when one of their friends killed another in a moment of brutal and tragic bloodshed. Alternating chapters, they pieced together a hard-boiled tale of bohemian New York during World War II, full of drugs and obsession, art and violence. The manuscript, named after a line from a news story about a fire at a circus, was rejected by publishers and confined to a filing cabinet for decades. Now, for the first time, this legendary collaboration between two of the twentieth century's most influential writers is being released. Both a fascinating piece of American literary history and an engrossing, atmospheric novel, it brings to life a shocking murder at the dawn of the Beat Generation.

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About the Author:

Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), father of the beat generation, was one of the most inventive writers of the twentieth century. He was the author of On the Road, The Dharma Bums, The Subterraneans, and many other books.

Review:
A combination hard-boiled murder mystery and existentialist lament on the meaninglessness of modern life think Dashiell Hammett meets Albert Camus. ... an essential document of the Beat Generation filled with precise details and precisely recorded dialogue from a place and period, pre-Atomic Age America, now almost irretrievably lost to us. But Hippos is more than just a debunking of the standard histories of the period. It contains the first clear expression of the core Beat vision of America as insane and morally corrupt a vision as apt and accurate today as it was when these outcasts and marginal outlaws began to emerge from their societal exile some 60 years ago. --San Francisco Chronicle

In alternating chapters, Burroughs and Kerouac serve up a noir vision of Manhattan... Of the two, Kerouac, then in his early 20s, is the more developed writer, though Burroughs, an absolute beginner, already shows some of the interests and obsessions that will turn up in Naked Lunch and elsewhere, to say nothing of an obviously field-tested understanding of how syringes work....For his part, Kerouac recounts wartime experiences in the Merchant Marine, along with notes on the bar scene that would do Bukowski proud. --Kirkus Reviews

Reveal[s] two giants-to-be in the development stages of their craft....With its evocative rendition of now-vanished saloons, bygone diners, and other landmarks of yesteryear, Burroughs and Kerouac may have inadvertently done for 1944 Greenwich Village what Joyce did for 1904 Dublin. Phoenix (Boston) The appearance in print of And the Hippos Were Boiled In Their Tanks by William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac is a literary event, not only because it drew two of the three leading Beat writers into confederacy, but because the book told a story of male friendship, gay obsession, and murder that came to fascinate a score of American authors....It s a fascinating snapshot from a lost era. If you re looking for the link between Hemingway s impotent post-war drifters in The Sun Also Rises, the barflies and Tralalas of Last Exit to Brooklyn, and the zonked-out kids of Bret Easton Ellis s Less Than Zero, look no further. Independent --(sources listed)

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Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs
Published by Blackstone Audio, Inc. (2008)
ISBN 10: 1433249111 ISBN 13: 9781433249112
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