Soft Machine - Softcover

William S Burroughs

3.43

6,510 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0586085610 ISBN 13: 9780586085615

Publisher: Harper Collins Pb, 2001

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Book one in Burroughs' surreal, anarchic 'Cut-Up Trilogy'. Hanged soldiers, North African street urchins, addicted narcotics agents, Spanish rent boys, evil doctors, corrupt judges and monsters from the mythology of history or the laboratories of science -- Burroughs is truly the Hieronymous Bosch of our time. In this surreal, savage and brilliantly funny novel, Burroughs' famous 'cut-up' technique, the slicing and random folding in of words, was fully developed, transforming the narrative into an extraordinary, unequalled new form of prose poetry.

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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'. William Burroughs died in 1997.

Review:

'"The Soft Machine" has its background in the underwater cities of Flash Gordon serials, broken-down towns in South America, faded photos and 1920s films in seedy movie houses. Essential reading.' Observer '[Burroughs'] great fictions [show] his superb, hard-edged satirical visions of cancerous and addictive consumerism; his elegiac and poetic invocations of sadness and dislocation; his enormous fertility of ideas and imagery.' Will Self, Guardian 'What Burroughs has tried to do, here as in other books, is to blend the reality of an addict's experience with his fantasies, and to create from this mixture a world compounded of myth and science fiction in which freedom and order are eternally opposed. Out of the dirt, the excrement, the couplings, Burroughs makes a disgusting, exciting poetry.' Sunday Times

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