Naked Lunch - Softcover

Burroughs, William S.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0586085602 ISBN 13: 9780586085608

Publisher: Harpercollins Pub Ltd, 1966

Synopsis

The anarchic, phenomenally strong-sellling classic from the godfather of the Beats. Welcome to Interzone! Say hello to Bradley the Buyer, the best narcotics agent in the business. Attend international playboy A.J.'s annual party, where the punch is to be treated with extreme caution. Meet Dr 'Fingers' Schafer, the Lobotomy Kid and his giant centipede, 'The Complete American De-anxietized Man.' And enter the dark and infernal mind of Bill Lee as he pursues his daily quest for the ultimate merchandise! Provocative, influential, morbidly fascinating, 'Naked Lunch' is an apocalyptic ride through the darker recesses of the human psyche.

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Review

"He was," as Salon's Gary Kamyia notes, "20th-century drug culture's Poe, its Artaud, its Baudelaire. He was the prophet of the literature of pure experience, a phenomenologist of dread.... Burroughs had the scary genius to turn the junk wasteland into a parallel universe, one as thoroughly and obsessively rendered as Blake's."

Why has this homosexual ex-junkie, whose claim to fame rests entirely on one book--the hallucinogenic ravings of a heroin addict--so seized the collective imagination? Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch in a Tangier, Morocco, hotel room between 1954 and 1957. Allen Ginsberg and his beatnik cronies burst onto the scene, rescued the manuscript from the food-encrusted floor, and introduced some order to the pages. It was published in Paris in 1959 by the notorious Olympia Press and in the U.S. in 1962; the landmark obscenity trial that ensued served to end literary censorship in America.

Burroughs's literary experiment--the much-touted "cut-up" technique--mirrored the workings of a junkie's brain. But it was junk coupled with vision: Burroughs makes teeming amalgam of allegory, sci-fi, and non-linear narration, all wrapped in a blend of humor--slapstick, Swiftian, slang-infested humor. What is Naked Lunch about? People turn into blobs amidst the sort of evil that R. Crumb, in the decades to come, would inimitably flesh out with his dark and creepy cartoon images. Perhaps the most easily grasped part of Naked Lunch is its America-bashing, replete with slang and vitriol. Read it and see for yourself.

About the Author

William Burroughs was born in St Louis, Missouri, in 1914. Immensely influential among the Beat writers of the 1950s -- notably Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg -- he already had an underground reputation before the appearance of his first important book, 'Naked Lunch'. Originally published by the daring and influential Olympia Press (the original publishers of Henry Miller) in France in 1959, it aroused great controversy on publication and was not available in the US until 1962 and in the UK until 1964. The book was adapted for film by David Cronenberg in 1991

About this edition

• Publisher: Harpercollins Pub Ltd
• Publication date: 1966
• ISBN 10: 0586085602
• ISBN 13: 9780586085608
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 208