{"product_id":"tristessa-9780140168112","title":"Tristessa","description":"\u003cb\u003eBased on Jack Kerouac's real-life love affair in Mexico City, this novel follows a man's doomed relationship with a woman as her life spirals out of control.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\"[Kerouac] loves language, and he obviously has a profound feeling for the human race. . . . In the end he is more truthful, entertaining, and honest than most writers on the American scene.\"--\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eThis short novel, which Jack Kerouac wrote in the mid-1950s, tells of an American man's ill-fated romance with an exotic, happy-go-lucky Mexican prostitute and morphine addict. Tristessa, who is Indian, and a deeply religious Catholic, lives in a room in a Mexico City slum with another addict and a menagerie of pets. After meeting her, the narrator leaves town for a year to travel in America, and upon his return he finds Tristessa beginning to fall apart at the seams. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eThis elegiac novel is both a haunting evocation of a spectral Mexico City and a moving meditation on a young woman's pain and suffering.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eJack Kerouac\u003c\/b\u003e was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922, the youngest of three children in a Franco-American family. He attended local Catholic and public schools and won a scholarship to Columbia University in New York City, where he first met Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs. His first novel, \u003ci\u003eThe Town and the City\u003c\/i\u003e, appeared in 1950, but it was \u003ci\u003eOn the Road\u003c\/i\u003e, published in 1957 and memorializing his adventures with Neal Cassady, that epitomized to the world what became known as the \"Beat generation\" and made Kerouac one of the most best-known writers of his time. Publication of many other books followed, among them \u003ci\u003eThe Dharma Bums\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Subterraneans\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eBig Sur\u003c\/i\u003e. Kerouac considered all of his autobiographical fiction to be part of \"one vast book,\" \u003ci\u003eThe Duluoz Legend\u003c\/i\u003e. He died in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1969, at the age of forty-seven.\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"Penguin Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50726056821010,"sku":"9780140168112","price":16.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_02a33ec6-8dc5-4e95-8a02-acc6ae9ae138.jpg?v=1734852731","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/tristessa-9780140168112","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}