Naked Lunch by William Burroughs
The anarchic, phenomenally strong-selling classic from the godfather of the Beats
Welcome to Interzone! Say hello to Bradley the Buyer, the best narcotics agent in the business. Check yourself into the hospital where Dr Benway works - but don't expect adrenalin if you need it (the night porter shot it up for kicks). Meet Dr 'Fingers' Schafer, the Lobotomy Kid, and his greatest creation, 'The Complete American De-anxietized Man', a marvel of invasive psychiatry who has been reduced to nothing but a spinal cord.
Told by an Ivy League-educated narcotics addict, Naked Lunch juxtaposes two journeys: the narrator's physical progress from America to North Africa, via Mexico, and a terrifying descent into his own altered consciousness. In this 'Interzone', loosely based on Burroughs' temporary home of Tangier, sex, drugs and murder are the most basic of commodities, and the basest desires have become completely banal. Provocative, influential, morbidly fascinating and mordantly funny, Naked Lunch takes us on an exhilarating ride through the darkest recesses of the human psyche - a ride which stunned the literary world when first published in the repressed 1950s, and is still guaranteed to epater more than a few bourgeois.
Over forty years since first publication, Burroughs scholar Barry Miles and Burroughs' longtime editor James Grauerholz have compiled this definitive restored text, correcting numerous errors that have accumulated over the years, and incorporating all of Burroughs' notes and accompanying essays. Most exciting of all, this edition includes an appendix of newly discovered, never before seen material - including alternate drafts from the original manuscript and letters from Burroughs' private correspondence.
About the Author
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.
Format: Paperback | 232 pages
Dimensions (cm): 20.9 x 13.7 x 1.7 | 290g
Publication Date: 1992
Publisher: Grove Press
Imprint: Grove Weidenfeld
Publication City/Country: New York, United States
Language: English
Edition Statement: Reprint ed.
ISBN10: 0802132952
ISBN13: 9780007878970
Condition: Acceptable
A vintage book with obvious wear. Has some damage to the cover, including creasing and scuff marks, and and a tear on the top-left corner of the front cover, but integrity still intact. There is some writing in margins in red pen, on the first page only, but no underlining and highlighting of text, and no missing pages or anything that would compromise the legibility or understanding of the text.