Books with author Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind has become a modern classic. It has been translated into nine languages and there are now three-quarters of a million copies in print. The title of this book is taken from Henry Miller's "Into the Night Life" and expresses the way Lawrence Ferlinghetti felt about these poems when he wrote them during a short period in the 1950's―as if they were, taken together, a kind of Coney Island of the mind, a kind of circus of the soul.

A Far Rockaway of the Heart is Ferlinghetti's sequel to A Coney Island of the Mind, written forty years later, in what the author has called "a poetry seizure" that lasted more than a year. A sequence of one hundred and one poems with recurrent themes, it includes various sections on love, art, music, history, and literature, as well as confrontations with major figures in the avant-garde before the arrival of the Beat generation. This edition now includes eighteen new poems from Ferlinghetti's "Pictures of the Gone World" which he publishes under his City Lights imprint. A self-styled "stand-up tragedian," Ferlinghetti has been called "the foremost chronicler of our times." If A Coney Island of the Mind was a generations vibrant eye-opener, A Far Rockaway of the Heart is a wake-up call for a new age.

A sequel to "A Coney Island of the Mind", & written 40 years after the original in what Ferlinghetti has called "a poetry seizure" that lasted more than a year, this collection is a sequence of 101 related poems with recurrent themes. The author also thinks of it as a kind of caustic critique of modern poetry, including confrontations with or parodies of major figures in the literary avant-garde before the arrival of the Beat generation, notably Pound & Eliot, Beckett & Joyce. A self-styled "stand-up tragedian," Ferlinghetti has been called "the foremost chronicler of our times."