Freedom Birds

"At night, on guard, staring into the dark, they were carried away by jumbo jets.
They felt the rush of takeoff Gone! they yelled. And then velocity, wings and engines, a smiling stewardess-but it was more than a plane, it was a real bird, a big sleek silver bird with feathers and talons and high screeching. They were flying. The weights fell off; there was nothing to bear. They laughed and held on tight, feeling the cold slap of wind and altitude, soaring, thinking It's over, I'm gone! - they were naked. They were light and free-it was all lightness, bright and fast and buoyant, light as light, a helium buzz in the brain, a giddy bubbling in the lungs as they were taken up over the Clouds and the war, beyond duty, beyond gravity and mortification anti global entanglements -Sin loi! They yelled, I'm sorry, motherfuckers, but I'm out of it, I'm goofed, I'm on a space cruise, I'm gone! -and it was a restful, disencumbered sensation, just riding the light waves, sailing; that big silver freedom bird over the mountains and oceans, over America, over the farms and great sleeping cities and cemeteries and highways and the Golden Arches of McDonald's. It was flight, a kind of fleeing, a kind of falling, falling higher and higher, spinning off the edge of the earth and beyond the sun and through the vast, silent vacuum where there were no burdens and where everything weighed exactly nothing. Gone! they screamed, I'm sorry but I'm gone! And so at night, not quite dreaming, they gave themselves over to lightness, they were carried, they were purely borne."

Tim O'Brien The Things They Carried

Philip Roth: "Nobody will read novels in 25 years"

Further On The Road

“There’s always more, a little further – it never ends,” wrote Jack Kerouac in his classic 1957 novel On The Road, an account of his cross-country adventures with fellow Beats such as Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and Neal Cassady. As “Dean Moriarty” (Kerouac’s publisher insisted he fictionalize the names of his friends), Cassady is one of the central figures of this book – a blur of motion and a speed demon behind the wheel – and the main connection between it and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Tom Wolfe’s 1968 book tracks the early history of Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, one of whom happened to be Neal Cassady, driver of their psychedelic day-glo bus Further. The Beat scene (fueled by speed, booze and jazz) was very different from the psychedelic scene (LSD, marijuana, folk-rock), but Cassady jitters from the pages of one book and into the next without missing a beat.

Lord of the Flies - Illustrated

Lord of The Flies | Sam Weber
A new illustrated edition of William Golding’s Lord of The Flies. Art Director: Sheri Gee.