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Tristessa
  • Published: 15 July 2025
  • ISBN: 9780241752067
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 112
  • RRP: $14.99

Tristessa

Formats & editions
Paperback
15 July 2025
EBook
4 July 2019
Paperback
17 Sept 2019
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90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books

Tristessa is a strange fever-dream of morphine sickness and belly-deep sadness. Or, in the words of Allen Ginsberg: ‘a narrative meditation studying a hen, a rooster, a dove, a cat, a chihuahua dog, family meat, and a ravishing, ravished junky lady, first in their crowded bedroom, then out to drunken streets, taco stands, and pads at dawn in Mexico City slums’.
  • Published: 15 July 2025
  • ISBN: 9780241752067
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 112
  • RRP: $14.99
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About the author

Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1922. In 1947, enthused by bebop, the rebel attitude of his friend Neal Cassidy, and the throng of hobos, drug addicts and hustlers he encountered in New York, he decided to discover America and hitchhhike across the country. His writing was openly autobiographical and he developed a style he referred to as 'spontaneous prose' which he used to record the experiences of the Beat Generation. Among his many novels are On the Road, Maggie Cassidy, The Subterraneans, The Dharma Bums and Big Sur. He died in 1969.
JK

Also by Jack Kerouac

On the Road
Visions of Gerard
Pic
Mexico City Blues
Piers of the Homeless Night
The Unknown Kerouac (LOA #283)
The Haunted Life
See all