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Bill Lee, an addict-hustler, travels to Mexico and then Tangier in order to find easy access to drugs, and ends up in the Interzone, a bizarre fantasy world
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"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."
About the Author:
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.
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.
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- PublisherGrove Pr
- Publication date1984
- ISBN 10 0394538846
- ISBN 13 9780394538846
- BindingHardcover
- Number of pages235
- Rating
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Naked Lunch
Published by
Grove Press, New York
(1984)
ISBN 10: 0394538846
ISBN 13: 9780394538846
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Hardcover
First Edition
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Book Description First edition thus. Hardcover. 235 pages. The twenty-fith anniversary edition of this classic novel. Features an introduction by Jennie Skerl. A near fine copy in paper covered boards with a cloth spine in a near fine dust jacket. Seller Inventory # 192635
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