Junky - Softcover

Burroughs, William S.

3.85

64,671 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140043519 ISBN 13: 9780140043518

Publisher: Penguin Books, 1977

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"In this complete and unexpurgated edition of one of the most powerful books about drug addiction, William S. Burroughs depicts the addict's life: his hallucinations, his ghostly nocturnal wanderings, his strange sexuality, and his hunger for the needle. Following its hero from his Midwestern birthplace to New York, New Orleans, and Mexico City, Junky is a memorable and shocking demonstration of the junk equation: "Junk is not, like alcohol or weed, a means to increased enjoyment of life. Junk is not a kick. It is a way of life." -- from the back cover "One of the most compelling and brilliant challenges any contemporary writer has raised against the absurd jurisdiction of death." -- The Washington Post

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About the Author:

William S. Burroughs (1914-1997)—guru of the Beat Generation, controversial �minence grise of the international avant-garde, dark prophet, and blackest of black humor satirists—had a range of influence rivaled by few post-World War II writers. His many books include Naked Lunch, Queer, Exterminator!, The Cat Inside, The Western Lands, and Interzone.

Review:

"Reads today as fresh and unvarnished as it ever has."-Will Self on Junky

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

The most important writer to emerge since World War II. . . . For his sheer visionary power, and for his humor, I admire Burroughs more than any living writer, and most of those who are dead.” J.G. Ballard

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

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

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

Burroughs voice is hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American.” Joan Didion

In 1953, at the height of American conformism and anti-communist hysteria, William S. Burroughs published Junky, an irresistible strung-out ode to the joys and perversities of drug addiction. . . . Junky eschews allegory for scrupulous realism. . . . More than anything else, Junky reads like a field guide to the American underworld.” The Daily Beast

Retro-cool, like something Don Draper might find in the Greenwich Village pad of that reefer-smoking painter he was seeing in the first season of Mad Men.” Las Vegas Weekly on Naked Lunch

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.” The Los Angeles Times Book Review

Burroughs seems to revel in a new medium . . . a medium totally fantastic, spaceless, timeless, in which the normal sentence is fractured, the cosmic tries to push its way through the bawdry, and the author shakes the reader as a dog shakes a rat.” Anthony Burgess on The Ticket That Exploded

In Burroughs’ hands, writing reverts to acts of magic, as though he were making some enormous infernal encyclopedia of all the black impulses and acts that, once made, would shut the fiends away forever.” The New York Times on The Ticket That Exploded

Macabre, funny, reverberant, grotesque.” The New York Review of Books on Nova Express

Hypnotic; I wish I could quote, but it takes several pages to get high on this stuff. . . . Funny . . . outrageous along the lines of Burroughs’s well-established scatology. He can think of the wildest parodies of erotic exuberance and invent the weirdest places for demonstrating them.” Harper’s Magazine on Nova Express

One of the most interesting pieces of radical fiction we have.” The Nation on The Soft Machine

In Burroughs’ hands, writing reverts to acts of magic, as though he were making some enormous infernal encyclopedia of all the black impulses and acts that, once made, would shut the fiends away forever.” The New York Times on The Wild Boys

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