This is the first full-length look at Zapple—the Beatles' label for experimental music and spoken word recordings and the most ambitious expression of the group's determination to be leading members of the counterculture movement in the late 1960s. Barry Miles, the acclaimed author, was the Zapple label manager and has written an engaging and slightly gossipy you-arethere review of this fascinating period in Beatles history. The book provides insight into the lives and working methods of leading literary and cultural figures of the time, including Allen Ginsberg, Charles Bukowski, Richard Brautigan, William Burroughs, and Frank Zappa. The Zapple Diaries is the fascinating story of an ill-fated experimental venture and a revealing account of the little-known last chapter of Beatles history.

Fifty years ago, Norman Mailer asserted, "William Burroughs is the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius." Few since have taken such literary risks, developed such individual political or spiritual ideas, or spanned such a wide range of media. Burroughs wrote novels, memoirs, technical manuals, and poetry. He painted, made collages, took thousands of photographs, produced hundreds of hours of experimental recordings, acted in movies, and recorded more CDs than most rock bands. Burroughs was the original cult figure of the Beat Movement, and with the publication of his novel Naked Lunch, which was originally banned for obscenity, he became a guru to the 60s youth counterculture. In CALL ME BURROUGHS, biographer and Beat historian Barry Miles presents the first full-length biography of Burroughs to be published in a quarter century-and the first one to chronicle the last decade of Burroughs's life and examine his...