Book description
The first novel in William Burroughs' anarchic 'Cut-Up Trilogy'.
A world populated by hanged soldiers, North African street urchins,
addicted narcotics agents, Spanish rent boys, evil doctors, corrupt
judges and monsters from the mythology of history or the laboratories of
science - Burroughs was truly the Hieronymus Bosch of the twentieth
century. In this surreal, savage and brilliantly funny novel, his famous
'cut-up' technique, the slicing and random folding in of words,
transforms the narrative into an extraordinary, unequalled new form of
prose poetry, taking us deeper into the dark recesses of Burroughs'
imagination. '“The Soft Machine” has its background in the underwater
cities of Flash Gordon serials, broken-down towns in South America,
faded photos and 1920s films in seedy movie houses. Essential reading.' Observer
'[Burroughs'] 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, Guardian
'A world compounded of myth and science fiction in which freedom and
order are eternally opposed. Out of the dirt, the excrement, the
couplings, Burroughs makes a disgusting, exciting poetry.' Sunday Times
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.
