Tucked away on the table between the only two chairs in the store...because if you are going to be arguing about the meaning of life, you had best be sitting down.

New York Times bestseller Sales phenomenon Now in an entirely new compact-sized paperback...at a mind-blowing price. Experience the ultimate flashback with this celebration of an era. Rich in illustratiosn and filled with the history, politics, sayings, and slogans that defined an age, this tribute to the 1960's counterculture is as groovy as it gets.

For those who were there, this volume will invoke the spirit of the time. Those who weren't, will wish they had been. Sex, drugs, and rock and roll; peace rallies and riots in the ghettos; Flower Power, Black Power, and Gay Power; Mothers of Invention and Women's Liberation; Woodstock, Monterey Pop, and Altamont. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times: it all depends on whom you ask. But without a doubt, hippies transformed society. Take a magical mystery tour through this revolutionary period. Every significant moment comes vibrantly alive once again in day-glo psychedelic images, rare portraits of writers and musicians, dynamite poster and album artwork, and photographic records of political events that shook the world. Hundreds of unforgettable quotations come from seminal figures such as Ken Kesey, Timothy Leary, Grace Slick, George Harrison, and Wavy Gravy.

Proceeding year by year from 1965-1971, Hippie gives an unprecedented degree of shape and coherence to an age of change--from the free-loving flower children of Haight-Ashbery to the student protesters of France--that by its nature is kaleidoscopically bewildering.

The Portable Sixties Reader
(Penguin Classics)
by Various, Charters, Ann

From civil rights to free love, JFK to LSD, Woodstock to the Moonwalk, the Sixties was a time of change, political unrest, and radical experiments in the arts, sexuality, and personal identity. In this anthology of more than one hundred selections of essays, poetry, and fiction by some of America's most gifted writers, Ann Charters sketches the unfolding of this most turbulent decade.

"The Portable Sixties Reader" is organized into thematic chapters, from the Civil Rights movement to the Anti-Vietnam movement, the Free Speech movement, the Counterculture movement, drugs and the movement into Inner Space, the Beats and other fringe literary movements, the Black Arts movement, the Women's movement, and the Environmental movement. The concluding chapter, "Elegies for the Sixties," offers tributes to ten figures whose lives-and deaths-captured the spirit of the decade.
Edited with an introduction by Ann Charters

The Catcher in the Rye
by Salinger, J. D.

The hero-narrator of "The Catcher in the Rye" is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caulfield. Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days.

The boy himself is at once too simple and too complex for us to make any final comment about him or his story. Perhaps the safest thing we can say about Holden is that he was born in the world not just strongly attracted to beauty but, almost, hopelessly impaled on it.

There are many voices in this novel: children's voices, adult voices, underground voices -- but Holden's voice is the most eloquent of all. Transcending his own vernacular, yet remaining marvelously faithful to it, he issues a perfectly articulated cry of mixed pain and pleasure. However, like most lovers and clowns and poets of the higher orders, he keeps most of the pain to, and for, himself. The pleasure he gives away, or sets aside, with all his heart. It is there for the reader who can handle it to keep.

Reality Sandwiches: 1953-1960
by Ginsberg, Allen

"Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages for yr own joy." Many of Ginsberg's most famous poems.

Wake-up nightmares in Lower East Side, musings in public library, across the U.S. in dream auto, drunk in old Havana, brooding in Mayan ruins, sex daydreams on the West Coast, airplane vision of Kansas, lonely in a leafy cottage, lunch hour on Berkeley, beer notations on Skid Row, slinking to Mexico, wrote this last night in Paris, back on Times square dreaming of Times Square, bombed in NY again, loony tunes in the dentist chair, screaming at old poets in South America, aethereal zigzag Poesy in blue hotel room in Peru-a wind-up book of dreams, psalms, journal enigmas &nude minutes from 1953 to 1960 poems scattered in fugitive magazines here collected.

On the Road
by Kerouac, Jack

This bible of the Beat Generation is now a modern classic of the unforgettable exuberance, poignancy, and passion of the 1950s.