Penguin Books Australia

Sal Paradise, young and innocent, joins the slightly crazed Dean Moriarty on a breathless, exuberant ride back and forth across the United States. Their hedonistic search for release or fulfilment through drink, sex, drugs and jazz becomes an exploration of personal freedom, a test of the limits of the American Dream.

A brilliant blend of fiction and autobiography, Jack Kerouac's exhilarating novel...

'Kerouac's best book' Time

'Stunning and vivid'   Sunday Times

'One of the most true, comic and grizzly journeys in American literature' Time

'A loud-mouthed novel . . . A frontal assault on life, a total abandonment to feeling' G uardian

An experimental novel which remained unpublished for years, Visions of Cody is Kerouac's fascinating examination of his own New York life, in a collection of colourful stream-of-consciousness essays. Transcribing taped conversations between members of their group as they took drugs and drank, this book reveals an intimate portrait of people caught up in destructive relationships with substances, and...

'A remarkable ear for the cadences of a phrase or sentence, a sense of how to register in words the sheer, sweet flow of things' Guardian

'Behind us lay the whole of America and everything Dean and I had previously known about life, and life on the road. We had finally found the magic land at the end of the road and we never dreamed the extent of the magic.'