The Road travelled by Jack London (Rutgers) is quite a different one. The first in Rutgers’ Subterranean Lives: Chronicles of Alternative America series, London’s Road contains all of the stories that he wrote about his hobo days at the turn of the nineteenth century, riding the rails with tramps who sported “monicas” like New York Tommy, Pacific Slim and Syracuse Shine. In “Hoboes That Pass in the Night,” London tells how he tramped “clear across Canada over three thousand miles of railroad” in 1894, following close on the heels of a hobo named Skysail Jack.

As Kerouac later described it, the letter was “a work of literary genius. Neal, he was just telling me what happened one time in Denver, and he had every detail. It was just like Dostoevsky. And I realized that’s the way to tell a story—just tell it!” That 1950 letter—at least the 5,100-word portion that remains—is included in Cassady’s Collected Letters, 1944-1967 (Penguin), as are more than 200 other letters written to Kerouac, Ginsberg, John Clellon Holmes and others, including a large selection of letters to Cassady’s second wife, Carolyn.

Portland is a great destination for fans of the independent presses. During a recent two-day trip, I selected a few must-have zines and chapbooks from a huge selection.

Sean Horlor’s debut book of poetry, Made Beautiful by Use (Signature Editions), contains lines that must be read out loud. The line “cologne in glass bottles,” for example, is so simple; but say it, “cologne in glass bottles,” roll it around on your tongue, “cologne in glass bottles,” and it becomes a mantra.

In my life I have only written one fan letter that began: “I have never written a fan letter before.” It was addressed to Shane Rhodes, and I wrote it after reading his poetry collections Holding Pattern (NeWest Press) and The Wireless Room (NeWest Press). What struck me about the work was that the lines begged to be read out loud: to be repeated, to be chanted, to be heard.

While considering the list of writers interviewed for each volume of The Paris Review Interviews (Picador) I couldn’t help thinking: “What an amazing literary gathering that would have been!” For the launch of volume i we can imagine a New York penthouse where a jazz trio plays Gershwin out on the terrace; inside, Dorothy Parker and Truman Capote make catty remarks about Ernest Hemingway, while Billy Wilder and James M. Cain knock back highballs and reminisce about their days writing dialogue for Double Indemnity back in 1944.

In Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey (Douglas & McIntyre), Alberto Manguel gives us a biography of the two books that he feels have, “more than any others . . . fed the imagination of the Western world for over two and a half millennia.” Manguel recounts various theories on the origins of these epic poems, including Samuel Butler’s suggestion that Homer was “a young unmarried woman, and a native of Sicily.”

Those who have read Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (Vintage), and those who have seen the film version, will remember that the sole possession of the eponymous patient, Count László de Almásy, was a battered copy of Herodotus’s Histories, an 1890 edition that he had turned into a kind of commonplace book with the inclusion of “other fragments—maps, diary entries, writings in many languages, paragraphs cut out of other books.”

As an avid long-distance cyclist who also loves to be pulled into a good adventure story, I could not resist Cioma Schönhaus’s book The Forger (Granta), a memoir that describes how Schönhaus lived in hiding in wartime Berlin while working clandestinely as a forger of identity cards.

The Tender Bar, the first book by J.R. Moehringer (Hyperion), a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, could be subtitled “The Secret Hearts of Dysfunctional Men.” In his memoir of growing up “fatherless” in Manhasset, Long Island, Moehringer recounts his progression from boy to man and the influence of the intimately connected group of men that acted as his father figure.