Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0802116396 ISBN 13: 9780802116390

Publisher: Grove Press, 2001

Since its original publication in Paris in 1959, Naked Lunch has become one of the most important novels of the twentieth century. Now, nearly forty years after the book's first U.S. appearance, Burroughs scholar Barry Miles and Burroughs's longtime editor James Grauerholz have given us an edition of the book that includes many editorial corrections and incorporates Burroughs's notes on the text, several essays he wrote over the years about the book, and, most excitingly, and appendix of forty pages of new material and alternate drafts from the original manuscript, which predates the edition that was eventually published by Olympia Press in Paris. For the Burroughs enthusiast and the neophyte, this volume is a valuable and fresh experience of perhaps his most enduring artistic legacy.

About the Author:

WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS (1914 1997) was the author of numerous novels, including Nova Express, The Ticket That Exploded, The Soft Machine, and The Wild Boys, and was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. JAMES GRAUERHOLZ was Burroughs s longtime secretary and editor. BARRY MILES has been involved for years with Beat literature as a scholar and participant. Among his books are The Beat Hotel and biographies of Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Jack Kerouac.

Review:

A masterpiece. A cry from hell, a brutal, terrifying, and savagely funny book that swings between uncontrolled hallucination and fierce, exact satire.” Newsweek

Ever since Naked Lunch William S. Burroughs has been ordained America’s most incendiary artist.” Los Angeles Times

A book of great beauty . . . . Burroughs is the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius.” Norman Mailer

A great, an essential novel [that] prefigures much that has occurred in history, the popular media and high and low culture in the past four decades.” The Commercial Appeal (Memphis)

A creator of grim fairy tales for adults, Burroughs spoke to our nightmare fears and, still worse, to our nightmare longings. . . . And more than any other postwar wordsmith, he bridged generations; popularity in the youth culture is greater now than during the heady days of the Beats.” Douglas Brinkley, The Los Angeles Times Book Review

Naked Lunch will leave the most amoral readers slack-jawed; and yet a trek beneath the depraved surface reveals interweaving caverns that ooze unsettling truths about the human spirit. . . . In the same galloping, lyrical way Walt Whitman celebrated democratic toilers of all stripes, Burroughs gleefully catalogs totalitarian spoilers and criminal types be they human or monster, psychological or pharmacological.” Mark Luce, The Kansas City Star

[Naked Lunch] made Burroughs’s reputation as a leader of the rebels against the complacency and conformity of American society. . . . An outrageous satire on the various physical and psychological addictions that turn human beings into slaves. . . . Burroughs’s vision of the addict’s life, by which we may infer the lives of all of us in some sense, is a vicious death-in-life of unrelieved abnegation, utter enervation and baroque suffering. Dante could not have envisioned such a post-Holocaust, post-apocalyptic circle of hell.” Frederic Koeppel, The Commercial Appeal

An absolutely devastating ridicule of all that is false, primitive, and vicious in current American life: the abuses of power, hero worship, aimless violence, materialistic obsession, intolerance, and every form of hypocrisy.” Terry Southern

Only after the first shock does one realize that what Burroughs is writing about is not only the destruction of depraved men by their drug lust, but the destruc­tion of all men by their consuming addictions . . . He is a writer of great power and artistic integrity engaged in a profoundly meaningful search for true values.” John Ciardi

Praise for William Burroughs:

Of all the Beat Generation writers, William S. Burroughs was the most dangerous. . . . He was anarchy's double agent, an implacable enemy of conformity and of all agencies of control-from government to opiates.” Rolling Stone

William was a Shootist. He shot like he wrote with extreme precision and no fear.” Hunter S. Thompson