Cities of the Red Night

Author: William S. Burroughs
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1466856602
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 344

Book Description
The first novel of the Red Night trilogy: “The most complete and most devastatingly sardonic statement of William Burroughs’s apocalyptic vision” (Newsday). Drawing freely from science fiction, hardboiled mystery, drug culture, and grotesque horror, William Burroughs trailblazed his own literary form, made famous with such classic novels as Naked Lunch. Considered by many to be his masterpiece, Cities of the Red Night is the first novel of his final trilogy, followed by The Place of Dead Roads and The Western Lands. Ranging across time and space, the kaleidoscopic narrative drops readers into a richly imagined alternate history. Our point of entry is the visionary pirate colony of Captain James Mission, who forged a society free of prejudice and oppression. From the 18th century we shuttle into the future, where a detective is on the hunt for a missing boy. Meanwhile, young men wage war against an evil empire of zealous mutants, and the population of this modern inferno is afflicted with a radioactive virus.

The Place of Dead Roads

Author: William S. Burroughs
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141976063
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 299

Book Description
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 who, with a succession of beautiful sidekicks, sets out to challenge the morality of small-town America and fight for intergalactic freedom. Fantastical and humorous, The Place of Dead Roads continues William Burroughs' exploration of society's controlling forces - the State, the Church, women, literature, drugs - with a style that is utterly unique in twentieth-century literature.

The Western Lands

Author: William S. Burroughs
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141975717
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 313

Book Description
A fascinating mix of autobiographical episodes and extraordinary Egyptian theology, Burroughs's 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 of the trilogy containing Cities of the Red Night and The Place of Dead Roads, this is a profound meditation on morality, loneliness, life and death.

Under the Black Flag

Author: Don Carlos Seitz
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Pirates
Languages : en
Pages : 362

Book Description

Call Me Burroughs

Author: Barry Miles
Publisher: Twelve
ISBN: 1455511943
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 676

Book Description
Fifty years ago, Norman Mailer asserted, "William Burroughs is the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius." Few since have taken such literary risks, developed such individual political or spiritual ideas, or spanned such a wide range of media. Burroughs wrote novels, memoirs, technical manuals, and poetry. He painted, made collages, took thousands of photographs, produced hundreds of hours of experimental recordings, acted in movies, and recorded more CDs than most rock bands. Burroughs was the original cult figure of the Beat Movement, and with the publication of his novel Naked Lunch, which was originally banned for obscenity, he became a guru to the 60s youth counterculture. In Call Me Burroughs, biographer and Beat historian Barry Miles presents the first full-length biography of Burroughs to be published in a quarter century-and the first one to chronicle the last decade of Burroughs's life and examine his long-term cultural legacy. Written with the full support of the Burroughs estate and drawing from countless interviews with figures like Allen Ginsberg, Lucien Carr, and Burroughs himself, Call Me Burroughs is a rigorously researched biography that finally gets to the heart of its notoriously mercurial subject.

The Wild Boys

Author: William S. Burroughs
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
ISBN: 0802197191
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 194

Book Description
The Wild Boys is a futuristic tale of global warfare in which a guerrilla gang of boys dedicated to freedom battles the organized armies of repressive police states. Making full use of his inimitable humor, wild imagination, and style, Burroughs creates a world that is as terrifying as it is fascinating.

Interzone

Author: William S. Burroughs
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0140094512
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 217

Book Description
In 1954 William Burroughs settled in Tangiers, finding a sanctuary of sorts in its shadowy streets, blind alleys, and lowlife decadence. It was this city that served as a catalyst for Burroughs as a writer, the backdrop for one of the most radical transformations of style in literary history. Burroughs's life during this period is limned in a startling collection of short stories, autobiographical sketches, letters, and diary entries, all of which showcase his trademark mordant humor, while delineating the addictions to drugs and sex that are the central metaphors of his work. But it is the extraordinary "WORD," a long, sexually wild and deliberately offensive tirade, that blends confession, routine, and fantasy and marks the true turning point of Burroughs as a writer-the breakthrough of his own characteristic voice that will find its full realization in Naked Lunch. James Grauerholz's incisive introduction sets the scene for this series of pieces, guiding the reader through Burroughs's literary evolution from the precise, laconic, and deadpan writer of Junky and Queer to the radical, uncompromising seer of Naked Lunch. Interzone is an indispensable addition to the canon of his works.

Book of Sketches

Author: Jack Kerouac
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1440626499
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 433

Book Description
In 1952 and 1953 as he wandered around America, Jack Kerouac jotted down spontaneous prose poems, or "sketches" as he called them, on small notebooks that he kept in his shirt pockets. The poems recount his travels—New York, North Carolina, Lowell (Massachusetts, Kerouac’s birthplace), San Francisco, Denver, Kansas, Mexico—observations, and meditations on art and life. The poems are often strung together so that over the course of several of them, a little story—or travelogue—appears, complete in itself. Published for the first time, Book of Sketches offers a luminous, intimate, and transcendental glimpse of one of the most original voices of the twentieth century at a key time in his literary and spiritual development.

Word Virus

Author: William S. Burroughs
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
ISBN: 0802197183
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 572

Book Description
With the publication of Naked Lunch in 1959, William Burroughs abruptly brought international letters into the postmodern age. Beginning with his very early writing (including a chapter from his and Jack Kerouac's never-before-seen collaborative novel), Word Virus follows the arc of Burroughs's remarkable career, from his darkly hilarious "routines" to the experimental cut-up novels to Cities of the Red Night and The Cat Inside. Beautifully edited and complemented by James Grauerholz's illuminating biographical essays, Word Virus charts Burroughs's major themes and places the work in the context of the life. It is an excellent tool for the scholar and a delight for the general reader. Throughout a career that spanned half of the twentieth century, William S. Burroughs managed continually to be a visionary among writers. When he died in 1997, the world of letters lost its most elegant outsider.

The Soft Machine

Author: William S. Burroughs
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
ISBN: 0802197213
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 202

Book Description
In Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs revealed his genius. In The Soft Machine he begins an adventure that will take us even further into the dark recesses of his imagination, a region where nothing is sacred, nothing taboo. Continuing his ferocious verbal assault on hatred, hype, poverty, war, bureaucracy, and addiction in all its forms, Burroughs gives us a surreal space odyssey through the wounded galaxies in a book only he could create.