Book description
A literary landmark and the most shocking novel in the English
language, William Burroughs' 'Naked Lunch' is an exhilarating ride into
the darkest recesses of the human psyche.
Meet Bradley the Buyer, the best narcotics agent in the business. Say
hello to Dr 'Fingers' Schafer, the Lobotomy Kid, and the sadistic,
manipulative Dr Benway. And then there's our narrator, Bill Lee, an Ivy
League-educated narcotics addict. This is the story of Bill's flight
south from New York to a drug-and-sex-soaked retreat in Tangiers, where
ambiguous Good and enticing Evil vie for the human soul. Welcome to
Interzone …
'Naked Lunch' is a masterpiece of modern literature by the godfather of
the Beat writers: as provocative and mordantly funny today as it was in
1959. 'Not a novel but a booty brought back from nightmare, a coldly
implacable look at the dark side of our nature.' New York Times
'A roller-coaster ride through hell, a safari to the strangest people
of the strangest planet - ourselves…sit back and gorge yourself on this
feast of a novel.' J. G. Ballard
'A delirious exploration of sexual violence through the art of
collage.' Time Out
'Prophesied with unerring accuracy the hideous modes that human
behaviour 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.' Will Self
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 William Burroughs was born in St
Louis, Missouri in 1914. Immensely influential among the Beat writers of
the 1950s - notably Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg - he already had an
underground reputation before the appearance of his first important
book, 'Naked Lunch'. Originally published by the daring and influential
Olympia Press (the original publishers of Henry Miller) in France in
1959, it aroused great controversy on publication and was not available
in the US until 1962 and in the UK until 1964. The book was adapted for
film by David Cronenberg in 1991. William Burroughs died in 1997.
