Beats to Release Book

With all the election coverage earlier this week, we managed to overlook a big story from the world of letters: Beatnik-fans will be thrilled to learn that the book that started it all—And the Hippos Were Boiled In Their Tanks, written by both William S Burroughs and Jack Kerouac in 1944, 13 years before On the Road—will finally be published. The book, which is a crime story about gay obsession and murder and whose chapters were written alternately by Burroughs and Kerouac, was previously unpublished because Burroughs did not want to damage the reputation of his friend Lou Carr, on whom it is based. Carr's death in 2005 freed it for publication.