Book Description:
Naked Lunch is one of the most important novels of the twentieth century, a book that redefined not just literature but American culture. An unnerving tale of a narcotics addict unmoored in New York, Tangiers, and, ultimately, a nightmarish wasteland known as Interzone. The restored text includes many editorial corrections and incorporates Burroughs s notes on the text and several essays he wrote over the years about the book. For the Burroughs enthusiast and neophyte alike, this is a valuable and fresh experience of this classic of our culture. /Content /EditorialReview EditorialReview Source Amazon.com Review /Source Content 'He was,' as <I>Salon</I>'s Gary Kamyia notes, '20th century drug culture's Poe, its Artaud, its Baudelaire. He was the prophet of the literature of pure experience, a phenomenologist of dread.... Burroughs had the scary genius to turn the junk wasteland into a parallel universe, one as thoroughly and obsessively rendered as Blake's.' <P> Why has this homosexual ex junkie, whose claim to fame rests entirely on one book the hallucinogenic ravings of a heroin addict so seized the collective imagination? Burroughs wrote <I>Naked Lunch</I> in a Tangier, Morocco, hotel room between 1954 and 1957. Allen Ginsberg and his beatnik cronies burst onto the scene, rescued the manuscript from the food encrusted floor, and introduced some order to the pages. It was published in Paris in 1959 by the notorious Olympia Press and in the U.S. in 1962; the landmark obscenity trial that ensued served to end literary censorship in America. <P> Burroughs's literary experiment the much touted 'cut up' technique mirrored the workings of a junkie's brain. But it was junk coupled with vision: Burroughs makes teeming amalgam of allegory, sci fi, and non linear narration, all wrapped in a blend of humor slapstick, Swiftian, slang infested humor. What is <I>Naked Lunch</I> about? People turn into blobs amidst the sort of evil that R. Crumb, in the decades to come, would inimitably flesh out with his dark and creepy cartoon images. Perhaps the most easily grasped part of <I>Naked Lunch</I> is its America bashing, replete with slang and vitriol. Read it and see for yourself.
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