Trenchant writings by that sardonic hombre invisible, William Seward
Burroughs, perpetrator of Naked Lunch and other shockers. These
malefic and beatific, mordant and hilarious straight-face reports on
life are mostly from scatter-shot publications in obscure places,
foreign and domestic. Including complete texts from White Subway,
Cobblestone Gardens, and The Retreat Diaries, this collection
delineates Burroughs' comprehensive world-view and his insurrectionary
sense of America's underside," as Tom Carson epitomized it in The
Village Voice.
Also included are essays on Burroughs by Alan Ansen and Paul Bowles, and
facsimile pages from the famous cut-up scrapbooks of the mid-century:
The Book of Hours, John Brady's Book, and The Old Farmer's
Almanac.
... his Swiftian vision of a processed, prepackaged life, of a kind of
electrochemical totalitarianism, often evokes the black laughter of
hilarious horror.--Playboy
Burroughs may be our only writer whose socio-political apacalyptica
transcend both paranoia and triviality; his imagination is superb, his
ear savagely satiric.--Kirkus Reviews
Burroughs is the greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift.--Jack
Kerouac
William Burroughs (1915-1997) is widely recognized as one of the
most innovative writers of the twentieth century. His books include:
Junky, Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, and Cities of the Red
Night.
