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.
"A masterpiece. A cry from hell, a brutal, terrifying, and savagely
funny book that swings between uncontrolled hallucination and
fierce, exact satire." --Newsweek "A book of great beauty and
manically exquisite insight with a wild and deadly humor . . . The
only American novelist who may conceivably be possessed by genius."
--Norman Mailer "Burroughs is the greatest satirical writer since
Jonathan Swift. . . . The net result of Naked Lunch will be to make
people shudder at their own lies, will be to make them open up and
be straight with one another. Swift and Rabelais and Sterne
accomplished a step in that direction, and Burroughs another."
--Jack Kerouac "Booty brought back from a nightmare." --The New
York Times "Burroughs called his greatest novel Naked Lunch, by
which he meant it's what you see on the end of a fork. He's a
writer of enormous richness whose books are a kind of attempt to
blow up this cozy conspiracy, to allow us to see what's on the end
of the fork . . . the truth." --J. G. Ballard "It's a completely
powerful and serious book, as good as anything in prose or poetry
written by a 'beat' writer, and one of the most alive books written
by any American for years. I don't see how it could be considered
immoral." --Robert Lowell "An absolutely devastating ridicule of
all that is false, primitive, and vicious in current American life:
the abuses of power, hero worship, aimless violence, materialistic
obsession, intolerance, and every form of hypocrisy." --Terry
Southern "Burroughs was the last great avatar of literary modernism
and Naked Lunch is his most important work. Like an intrepid
explorer in to the inner space of the human psyche, Burroughs was
unafraid to offer up his own unconscious as a kind of test bed,
within which to allow the most sinister and viral of ideas to
propagate. It was this activity--part alchemical, part
psychological--that allowed him to prophesy with unerring accuracy
the hideous modes that human behavior would assume in the
post-apocalyptic second half of the twentieth century. Naked Lunch
is essential reading for anyone who maintains any illusions about
anything; to quote its author: 'Rub out the word.'" --Will Self
"Burroughs is a superb writer, and Naked Lunch a novel of revolt in
the best late-modern sense. . . . If there should be a twenty-first
century, this is one of the few works historians could turn to for
a grasp, both imaginative and intelligent, of the strange
historical phase of the human condition we are living through."
--E. S. Seldon "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." --The Los Angeles Times
Book Review "Only after the first shock does one realize that what
Burroughs is writing about is not only the destruction of depraved
men by their drug lust, but the destruc¬tion of all men by their
consuming addictions. . . . He is a writer of great power and
artistic integrity engaged in a profoundly meaningful search for
true values." --John Ciardi "This book, which is not a novel but a
booty brought back from nightmare, takes a coldly implacable look
at the dark side of our nature. Civilization fails many; many fail
civilization. William Burroughs has written the basic work for
understanding that desperate symptom which is the beat style of
life." --Herbert Gold "A landmark experimental novel." --Los
Angeles Times "Probably the most audacious book by any American
writer since Henry Miller's celebrated pair of Tropics." --Chicago
Tribune "Naked Lunch is a dark, wild ride through the terror of
heroin addiction and withdrawal, filled with paranoia, erotica and
drug-fueled hallucinations." --NPR "An astonishingly lurid account
of an addict on the run from the Man." --San Francisco Weekly
"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." --The Kansas City Star "Naked
Lunch still delivers the gut-grabbing jolt of the autoerotic
hangings that punctuate its pages, every death erection and
post-mortem ejaculation described with a grim relish that walks the
line between cry of conscience and shudder of fetishistic pleasure.
. . . Burroughs . . . shoves America headfirst into the bilge of
its hypocrisies." --Las Vegas Weekly "[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." --The
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