The Soft Machine: The Restored Text (Cut-up Trilogy) - Softcover

Burroughs, William S

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802122116 ISBN 13: 9780802122117

Publisher: Grove Press / Atlantic Monthly Press, 2014

Synopsis

A surreal space age odyssey through the wounded galaxies, and the first book in Burroughs's "cut-up trilogy," "The Soft Machine" begins an adventure that takes the reader into the dark recesses of Burroughs's imagination, a place where nothing is sacred, nothing is taboo. "The Soft Machine" is a verbal assault on hatred, hype, poverty, war, bureaucracy, and addiction in all its forms, and a surreal space odyssey through the wounded galaxies--a book that only Burroughs could create. This revised and rationalized edition, edited by renowned Burroughs scholar Oliver Harris, incorporates a new introduction and appendices, which make it the definitive edition of the text.

About this title

Review:

"The voice in The Soft Machine is talking about time. . . . [It] slips deliberately and frequently, sometimes ironically and sometimes not . . . rattles off elliptical allusions, throws away joke after outrageous joke, shifts gear in mid-sentence, never falters. It is precisely this voice--complex, subtle, allusive--that is the fine thing about The Soft Machine and about Burroughs."--Joan Didion

"One of the most interesting pieces of radical fiction we have."--The Nation

"[Burroughs's] great fictions [show] his superb, hard-edged satirical visions of cancerous and addictive consumerism; his elegiac and poetic invocations of sadness and dislocation; his enormous fertility of ideas and imagery." --Will Self

"Out of the dirt, the excrement, the couplings, Burroughs makes a disgusting, exciting poetry."--Sunday Times

"The author, no longer raging in obscurity with his devils, has devised a technique, the Cut Up and Pemutation. . . . Burroughs writes, and cuts, and pastes, and adds, and recuts, repastes, rearranges by hazard."--The New York Times Book Review

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

From the Back Cover:

Hanged soldiers, North African street urchins, addicted narcotic agents, Spanish rent boys, evil doctors, corrupt judges and monsters from the mythology of history or the laboratories of science – Burroughs is truly the Hieronymous Bosch of our time. In this surreal, savage and brilliantly funny sequel to Naked Lunch, Burroughs's famous 'cut-up' technique, the slicing and random folding in of words, was fully developed, transforming the narrative into an extraordinary, unequalled new form of prose poetry.

About this edition

• Publisher: Grove Press / Atlantic Monthly Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0802122116
• ISBN 13: 9780802122117
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336
• Editor: Harris Professor Oliver