Lost Kerouac Book Published

From Hunter to Ayn, the Telegraph lists books you can 'wear like a leather jacket'

(NEWSER) - It’s hard to define the "cult" book, but the Telegraph compiled 50 of the top contenders that “rewire your head.”

• The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe (1968)
• Baby and Child Care by Dr Benjamin Spock (1946)
• Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse (1922)
• The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (1943)
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)

For On the Road 's 50th, friends remember the real Jack

(NEWSER) - For today’s 50th anniversary of On the Road’s publication, Slate canvassed some of Jack Kerouac’s associates, creating a dramatic and nostalgic picture. The poet’s agent remembers he was thrown for a loop by the “demon” of “public reaction, celebrity,” and Carolyn Cassady recalls him as “a hunk, a football star, and a klutz.” More»

Kerouac adaptation 30 years in the making debuts

(NEWSER) - The film adaptation of On the Road has finally reached the screen, more than 30 years after producer Roman Coppola bought the rights to Jack Kerouac's Beat Generation classic. The movie, which stars Sam Riley, Garrett Hedlund, Kristen Stewart, and Kirsten Dunst, made its debut at the Cannes film festival yesterday, reports the BBC . Director Walter Salles told reporters that he tried to stay true to Kerouac's improvisational style in his sex, drugs, and jazz-filled semi-autobiographical novel. More»

Received intelligence about plot at Jaipur literary event

(NEWSER) - Salman Rushdie has dropped out of India's top literary festival after hearing that assassins may have been planning to attend—and kill him. Powerful clerics had protested the author's attendance at the Jaipur festival, which opened today and was to feature Rushdie as a speaker. But "intelligence sources in Maharashtra and Rajasthan" informed him "that paid assassins from the Mumbai underworld may be on their way to Jaipur to 'eliminate' me," he said in a statement, according to the BBC . More»

An editor was likely the one to polish her prose, says professor

(NEWSER) - Jane Austen is known as a “perfect stylist,” but those perfectly crafted sentences may not actually be hers. After studying 1,100 pages of Austen’s handwritten, unpublished manuscripts, an Oxford professor concluded that “the polished punctuation and epigrammatic style … is simply not there,” she tells the BBC . In its place is a more free-flowing, somewhat untidy style, featuring limited punctuation. More»