My Education: A Book of Dreams (Penguin Modern Classics) - Softcover

William S. Burroughs

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141189894 ISBN 13: 9780141189895

Publisher: Penguin Books, 2009

Synopsis

"My Education" is Burroughs' last novel, first published two years before his death in 1997. It is a book of dreams, collected over several decades and as close to a memoir as we will see. The dreams cover themes from the mundane and ordinary - conversations with his friends Allen Ginsberg or Ian Sommerville, feeding his cats, procuring drugs or sex - to the erotic, bizarre and visionary. Always a rich source of imagery in Burroughs' own fiction, in this book dreams become a direct and powerful force in themselves.

About this title

About the Author

William S. Burroughs was born on February 5, 1914 in St Louis. In work and in life Burroughs expressed a lifelong subversion of the morality, politics and economics of modern America. To escape those conditions, and in particular his treatment as a homosexual and a drug-user, Burroughs left his homeland in 1950, and soon after began writing. By the time of his death he was widely recognised as one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the twentieth century. His numerous books include Naked Lunch, Junky, Queer, Nova Express, Interzone, The Wild Boys, The Ticket That Exploded and The Soft Machine. After living in Mexico City, Tangier, Paris, and London, Burroughs finally returned to America in 1974. He died in 1997.

From Kirkus Reviews

As Burroughs's last book of prose (The Cat Inside, 1992) demonstrated, his publishers will print anything by the octogenarian hipster, even a silly cat book. This latest purports to be a novel, but it's really more random scribbling by the Nike sneaker shill, whose media image far exceeds his achievement as a writer. These ragged, disjointed paragraphs chronicle a year or so of Burroughs's dream life, which is much less lurid than one would expect. Sure, there are drugs (hash, heroin, morphine, laudanum, etc.) and cameos by all his friends living and dead (Brion Gysin, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Paul Bowles, Ian Somerville, etc.). But the sex is nondescript (``sex with James'' or ``made it with Ian''); the places all familiar to Beat groupies (Tangier, Paris, London, and Lawrence, Kans.); and the familial stuff, which has passed into legend, is just alluded to (shot wife playing Wm. Tell; son dead at an early age). Burroughs likes to show his knowledge of guns (``.45 Ruger APC and Long Colt Cylinder'') and frequently expresses his preference for cats over dogs and people. Some vintage moments include a dream of a cockroach stuck in his ear and of a man scooping his brains from his skull to eat. Burroughs really comes alive, though, when he leaves his dreamscapes to explicate. A dream of a ``shitting woman'' leads to a long and sordid anecdote about a ``queen'' friend married to a wealthy woman with a severe colon problem. Burroughs's political commentary amounts to some dated rants about Anita Bryant, Ronald Reagan, and the CIA. His claim to total honesty and authenticity leads him to debunk Ted Morgan's view of him as a ``literary outlaw.'' His waking thoughts dwell sentimentally on cats, with occasional riffs that remind one of the old Burroughs. Die-hard fans will no doubt scoop this up, others need not go beyond Naked Lunch, preferably in David Cronenberg's movie version. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0141189894
• ISBN 13: 9780141189895
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 208