Charles Shuttleworth w/ Jim Jones, THE BUDDHIST YEARS

About the Book

Join Beat Generation scholar Charles Shuttleworth for a discussion of The Buddhist Years: Collected Writings, a brand new volume of previously unpublished writings from the archives reflecting Jack Kerouac’s Buddhist thinking. He’s joined by local Kerouac scholar Jim Jones.

From a young age Kerouac was a spiritual thinker and questioner, and he always considered himself a spiritual writer. Buddhism gave more meaning to Jack’s work as a writer: he was working not for personal accomplishment and glory but for human betterment. And Buddhism justified his lifestyle: with its vision of the material world as empty and illusory, he was free to do what he wanted.

This collection shows Jack at his earnest, soulful best. The writing is consistently and wonderfully Kerouacian: it is honest, reflective, heartfelt, and revealing, with great characterizations amid his self-exploration as he wrestles with his consciousness, desperate for belief.

With the publication of The Buddhist Years, Charles Shuttleworth has now edited three volumes of writings from the Kerouac archive, including Desolation Peak (2022) and Self-Portrait (2024, co-edited with Paul Maher, Jr.), all by Rare Bird Books / Sal Paradise Press. He has also written a book-length study of The Scripture of the Golden Eternity that’s waiting in the wings, and he is at work on a novel about a fictitious Beat poet whom he has fitted into the Beat-Hippie chronology. He has been teaching classes on Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation over the past 30 years, currently at the Harker School in San Jose, CA.

After earning his Ph.D. in 1980, Jim Jones taught American literature and literary criticism for twenty-five years, during which time he published four academic monographs, as well as several trade books, focusing on the writing of the American novelist Jack Kerouac. He also founded Church of the Head Press, which published ten volumes of poetry through the 1990s. After retiring to Seattle in 2006, he edited the Journal of the Book Club of Washington for three and a half years. About the same time, he learned the art of letterpress printing and founded another publishing company, J. Jones Imprimatur, to print poetry postcards. During the pandemic he wrote, designed, printed, and bound an edition of his own book, ABC of World Religion. In 2020 he became publisher of Ex Ophidia Press, founded by the world-renowned handpress printer Gabriel Rummonds. Jones managed the press’s poetry book contest for two years and published five volumes of poetry before stepping down. After publishing a book of his own poetry, Out of the Ordinary, he revised and released the third edition of Jack Kerouac in Seattle in 2024. He is currently at work on a memoir of his years in a Roman Catholic seminary in the mid-1960s.

Pre-order your copy of The Buddhist Years here.

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