An intimate portrait of the son of the best-selling counterculture author draws on his final journals, poems, and correspondence to offer insight into the factors that challenged his life, from his relationship with his father to his tragic personal losses. Original.[...]
William Burroughs was one of post-war America's most controversial and influential writers. This is the authoritative, indispensable anthology of his greatest work.[...]
The hypocrisy of contemporary society is the focal point of this novel about various forms of extermination[...]
Recounts William Lee's seduction of Eugene Allerton in the Mexico City of the 1940s and the romantic agonies he suffered[...]
Interzone portrays the development of Burroughs's mature writing style by presenting a selection of pieces from the mid-1950s. His outrageous tone of voice represents the exorcism of four decades of oppressive sexual and social conditioning. Burroughs's close observations of humanity - its ugliness [...]
Drawing heavily on Egyptian mythology, this visionary novel follows Joe the Dead, Kim Carsons, Neferti, Hassan i Sabbah, and the Old Man of the Mountains on their hazardous pilgrimage toward immortality[...]
In 1944, the authors, then still unknown writers, were both arrested following a murder: one of their friends had stabbed another and then come to them for advice - neither had told the police. This book is an insight into the lives and literary development of two great writers.[...]
Nightmarish and fiercely funny, William Burroughs' virtuoso, taboo-breaking masterpiece Naked Lunch follows Bill Lee through Interzone: a surreal, orgiastic wasteland of drugs, depravity, political plots, paranoia, sadistic medical experiments and endless, gnawing addiction. One of the most shocking[...]
An outrageous hybrid of pulp science fiction, obscene experimental poetry, and manifesto for revolution, The Ticket That Exploded is a last chance antidote to the virus of lies spread by the ad men and con men of the Nova Mob, a call to arms against those driving our planet toward the point of destr[...]
A terrifying, surreal space-age odyssey, The Soft Machine initiated Burroughs' Cut-Up Trilogy that includes Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded. The book draws the reader into an unmappable textual space, where nothing is true and everything is permitted, to make a total assault on the colonis[...]
This surreal fable, set in America's Old West, features a cast of notorious characters: The Crying Gun, who breaks into tears at the sight of his opponent; The Priest, who goes into gunfights giving his adversaries the last rites; and The Nihilistic Kid himself, Kim Carson, a homosexual gunslinger w[...]
These letters cover the activities of Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac in the years that gave birth to the "Beat Generation". Written mostly to Ginsberg or Kerouac, the letters provide a rare glimpse into Burroughs' psyche, revealing his struggle with drug addiction, his confusion over hi[...]
Burroughs' first novel, a largely autobiographical account of the constant cycle of drug dependency, cures and relapses, remains the most unflinching, unsentimental account of addiction ever written. Through junk neighbourhoods in New York, New Orleans and Mexico City, through time spent kicking, ti[...]
In this funny, nightmarish masterpiece of imaginative excess, grotesque characters engage in acts of violent one-upmanship, boundless riches mangle a corner of Africa into a Bacchanalian utopia, and technology, flesh and violence fuse with and undo each other. A fragmentary, freewheeling novel, it s[...]
A man, dispirited by ageing, endeavours to steal a younger man's face; a doctor yearns for a virus that might eliminate his discomfort by turning everyone else into doubles of himself; a Colonel lays out the precepts of the life of DE (Do Easy); conspirators posthumously succeed in blowing up a trai[...]
William Burroughs' work was dedicated to an assault upon language, traditional values and all agents of control. Produced at a time when he was at his most extreme and messianic, "The Job" lays out his abrasive, incisive, paranoiac, maddened and maddening worldview in interviews interspersed with st[...]
William Burroughs closed his classic debut novel, "Junky", by saying he had determined to search out a drug he called 'Yage' which he believed transmitted telepathic powers, a drug that could be 'the final fix'. In "The Yage Letters" - a mix of travel writing, satire, psychedelia and epistolary nove[...]
"Interzone" portrays the development of Burroughs' mature writing style by presenting a selection of pieces from the mid-1950s. His outrageous tone of voice represents the exorcism of four decades of oppressive sexual and social conditioning. Burroughs' close observations of humanity - its ugliness [...]
"My Education" is Burroughs' last novel, first published two years before his death in 1997. It is a book of dreams, collected over several decades and as close to a memoir as we will see. The dreams cover themes from the mundane and ordinary - conversations with his friends Allen Ginsberg or Ian So[...]
Both heartwarming and meditative, "The Cat Inside" explores not only the personal relationship between Burroughs and cats, but the deeper relationship of cats with mankind, which Burroughs traces back to the Egyptians. This book of moving and witty discourse is for both Burroughs' fans and cat lover[...]
Originally written in 1952 but not published till 1985, "Queer" is an enigma - both an unflinching autobiographical self-portrait and a coruscatingly political novel, Burroughs' only realist love story and a montage of comic-grotesque fantasies that paved the way for his masterpiece, "Naked Lunch". [...]
The diabolical Nova Criminals now include the nightmarish characters of Sammy the Butcher, Iron Claws, Izzy the Push and the Brown Artist, and are poised to wreak untold destruction on the world with their new-found control. Only Inspector Lee of the Nova Police has any chance of stopping them, by d[...]
An opium addict is lost in the jungle; young men wage war against an empire of mutants; a handsome young pirate faces his execution; and, the world's population is infected with a radioactive epidemic. These stories are woven together in a single tale of mayhem and chaos. In the first novel of the t[...]
A fascinating mix of autobiographical episodes and extraordinary Egyptian theology, Burroughs' final novel is poignant and melancholic. Blending war films and pornography, and referencing Kafka and Mailer, "The Western Lands" confirms his status as one of America's greatest writers. The final novel [...]