Naked Lunch: the Restored Text - Softcover

William Burroughs

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802140181 ISBN 13: 9780802140180

Publisher: Grove Press / Atlantic Monthly Press, 2004

Synopsis

Bill Lee, an addict and 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, in a commemorative edition that features restored text, archival material, Burroughs's own later introduction to the book, and his essay o

About this title

Review

"Naked Lunch is a great, an essential novel...It prefigures much that has occurred in history, the popular media and high and low culture in the past four decades." "A masterpiece. A cry from hell, a brutal, terrifying, and savagely funny book that swings between uncontrolled hallucination and fierce, exact satire." --"Newsweek" "Ever since Naked Lunch...William S. Burroughs has been ordained America's most incendiary artist." -"Los Angeles Times" "A book of great beauty . . . . Burroughs is the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius." --Norman Mailer "A great, an essential novel...[that] prefigures much that has occurred in history, the popular media and high and low culture in the past four decades." -"The Commercial Appeal" (Memphis) "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." --Douglas Brinkley, "The Los Angeles Times Book Review" "Naked Lunch will leave the most amoral readers slack-jawed; and yet a trek beneath the depraved surface reveals interweaving caverns that ooze unsettling truths about the human spirit. . . . In the same galloping, lyrical way Walt Whitman celebrated democratic toilers of all stripes, Burroughs gleefully catalogs totalitarian spoilers and criminal types--be they human or monster, psychological or pharmacological." --Mark Luce, "The Kansas City Star" "[Naked Lunch] made Burroughs's reputation as a leader of the rebels against the complacency and conformity of American society. . . . An outrageous satire on the various physical and psychological addictions that turn human beings into slaves. . . . Burroughs's vision of the addict's life, by which we may infer the lives of all of us in some sense, is a vicious death-in-life of unrelieved abnegation, utter enervation and baroque suffering. Dante could not have envisioned such a post-Holocaust, post-apocalyptic circle of hell." --F

About the Author

William S. Burroughs was born in St. Louis in 1914 and lived in Chicago, New York, Texas, Paris, Tangier, London, and Lawrence, Kansas, where he died in August 1997. He was the author of numerous books, including Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, Nova Express, The Ticket that Exploded, and The Wild Boys, and was inducted as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. James Grauerholz was William Burroughs's longtime manager and editor, and is now his literary executor.

Edition details

• Publisher: Grove Press / Atlantic Monthly Press
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0802140181
• ISBN 13: 9780802140180
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 429