The Ticket That Exploded: The Restored Text (Penguin Modern Classics) - Softcover

William S. Burroughs

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141189770 ISBN 13: 9780141189772

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 2014

Synopsis

An outrageous hybrid of pulp science fiction, obscene experimental poetry, and manifesto for revolution, The Ticket That Exploded is a last chance antidote to the virus of lies spread by the ad men and con men of the Nova Mob, a call to arms against those driving our planet toward the point of destruction. Like the other two volumes of Burroughs' Cut-Up Trilogy, The Soft Machine and Nova Express, it is today as fresh in its form and as urgent in its message as it has ever been.

Edited and introduced by renowned Burroughs scholar Oliver Harris, this new edition reveals how the book's cultural reach has expanded with the viral logic of Burroughs' multi-media creative methods.

About this title

Review:

‘As filthy and boggling as it was in 1968 – would he get away with it today?’ Time Out

‘The fold-in technique gives excellent comic and satiric results...cleverly combines the raw energy of lowbrow spy- and science-fiction with the brutal unfamiliarity of hardcore pornography.’ Spectator

‘He has a savage sense of comedy and a cleverly educated ear for the haunting casual phrase.’ Scotsman

‘In Mr Burroughs’s hands, writing reverts to acts of magic, as though he were making some enormous infernal encyclopaedia of all the black impulses and acts that, once made, would shut the fiends away forever.’ New York Times

‘His Swiftian vision of a processed, pre-packaged life, a kind of electro-chemical totalitarianism, often evokes the black laughter of hilarious horror.’ Playboy

Praise for William Burroughs:

'Burroughs is the greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift.' Jack Kerouac

'Burroughs' voice is hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American, a voice in which one hears transistor radios and old movies and all the clichés and all the cons and all the newspapers, all the peculiar optimism, all the failure.' Joan Didion

'The only American novelist who may conceivably be possessed by genius.' Norman Mailer

'In the English language, William Burroughs is the greatest writer alive. His imagination has tackled head-on the post-war world, with its huge bureaucracies and sinister complexes. He has a paranoid vision, but as he himself said: the psychotic is someone who knows what's really going on.' J. G. Ballard, Sunday Times

‘William Burroughs broadened people’s conception of what makes humanity. In that way, he really was an American hero, a hero writer, and also just a great man.’ Lou Reed

About the Author:

William S. Burroughs was born on February 5, 1914 in St Louis. In work and in life Burroughs expressed a lifelong subversion of the morality, politics and economics of modern America. To escape those conditions, and in particular his treatment as a homosexual and a drug-user, Burroughs left his homeland in 1950, and soon after began writing. By the time of his death he was widely recognised as one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the twentieth century. His numerous books include Naked Lunch, Junky, Queer, Nova Express, Interzone, The Wild Boys, The Ticket That Exploded and The Soft Machine. After living in Mexico City, Tangier, Paris, and London, Burroughs finally returned to America in 1974. He died in 1997.

Oliver Harris is professor of American literature at Keele University and the editor of The Letters of William S. Burroughs, 1945-1959 (1993), Junky: the Definitive Text of "Junk" (2003), The Yage Letters Redux (2006), and Everything Lost: The Latin American Notebook of William S. Burroughs (2008). He has published articles on film noir, the epistolary, and Beat Generation writing and the book William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination (2003). He is currently co-editing Naked Lunch@50: Anniversary Essays (2009) and working on a new twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Queer (forthcoming in 2010).

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0141189770
• ISBN 13: 9780141189772
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352
• Editor: Oliver Harris