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.
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Hi, I'm William S. Burroughs
William Seward Burroughs II (February 5, 1914 – August 2, 1997) was an American writer, visual artist, spoken word performer, and chaos magician credited as a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodern author who influenced popular culture and literature.
Burroughs wrote eighteen novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays, and five books have been published of his interviews and correspondences. He also collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians and made many appearances in films. He was also briefly known by the pen name William Lee.
Burroughs created and exhibited thousands of paintings and other visual artworks, including his celebrated 'Shotgun Art'. In 1983, Burroughs was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
In 1984, he was awarded the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France. Jack Kerouac called Burroughs the "greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift,” he owed this reputation to his "lifelong subversion" of the moral, political, and economic systems of modern American society, articulated in often darkly humorous sardonicism. J. G. Ballard considered Burroughs to be "the most important writer to emerge since the Second World War,” while Norman Mailer declared him "the only American writer who may be conceivably possessed by genius".
