New Releases by William S. Burroughs

First published in 1963 and representing Burroughs's literary breakthrough in the UK, Dead Fingers Talk is, in the words of Burroughs scholar Oliver Harris, "e;a prophetic work of haunting power,"e; a unique experiment in writing that has for too long been overlooked. Combining new material with rearranged selections from Naked Lunch and his cut-up novels The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded, the book is a fascinating precursor to remix and mash-up forms in art and music, which owe much to Burroughs's influence.This newly restored edition of Dead Fingers Talk, based on the novel's archival manuscripts, will delight all Burroughs fans and lovers of experimental literature, and offer a new insight into the artistic process of one of the most original and influential writers of the twentieth century

As seen through the eyes of Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, this is the gripping story behind the acclaimed film Kill Your Darlings, starring Daniel Radcliffe.In 1944, Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs were charged as accessories to murder. One of their friends, Lucien Carr, had stabbed another, David Kammerrer. Carr had come to each of them and confessed; Kerouac helped him get rid of the weapon - neither told the police. For this failing they were arrested. Months later, the two writers - unpublished at the time - collaborated on And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, a fictionalized account of the summer of the killing.William S. Burroughs was born in 1914. His first published novel was the largely autobiographical Junky, which remains a classic depiction of drug dependency. He died in 1997.Jack Kerouac was born in 1922. In 1947, he hitchhiked across America and wrote his most famous novel On the Road. He died in 1969.'The true(ish) story that Burroughs and Kerouac tell is sleazy, raw and painfully close to the bone even by the standards of the Beats ... [It's] also fascinating for the insight it gives into Kerouac and Burroughs' development ... A compelling read' Sam Jordison, Guardian'Their efforts cohere into a spare existential narrative which races to a cruel denouement. Hippos stands the test of time; it is admirably hard-boiled' Independent'Anyone interested in the making of the Beat generation will be fascinated by this survival from its beginnings' Literary Review'Transfixingly readable ... It memorably evokes the demi-monde of New York at the war's end, with its honky-tonk parlours, automats, bars and spaghetti joints. As a period piece, it can't be beat' Evening Standard

Junk is not, like alcohol or a weed, a means to increased enjoyment of life. Junk is not a kick. It is a way of life. In his debut novel, Junky, Burroughs fictionalized his experiences using and peddling heroin and other drugs in the 1950s into a work that reads like a field report from the underworld of post-war America. The Burroughs-like protagonist of the novel, Bill Lee, see-saws between periods of addiction and rehab, using a panoply of substances including heroin, cocaine, marijuana, paregoric (a weak tincture of opium) and goof balls (barbiturate), amongst others. For this definitive edition, renowned Burroughs scholar Oliver Harris has gone back to archival typescripts to re-created the author''s original text word by word. From the tenements of New York to the queer bars of New Orleans, Junky takes the reader into a world at once long-forgotten and still with us today. Burroughs’s first novel is a cult classic and a critical part of his oeuvre.

William S. Burroughs was one of the twentieth century’s most iconoclastic literary and artistic figures, an inimitable writer whose groundbreaking work in novels such as Junky and Naked Lunch forever altered the shape of American culture. Now, in this long anticipated collection, editor Bill Morgan takes readers through Burroughs’ correspondence from the early sixties through the mid-seventies, in more than three hundred letters that document Burroughs’ steady drift away from the Beat circle and that witness an era in which he became the center of a new coterie of creative people who would establish his reputation as an influential artistic and cultural leader beyond the literary world, toward multimedia. Written to recipients such as Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, Timothy Leary, and Burroughs’ son, Billy Burroughs Jr., these letters shed new light on the writer’s controversial artistic process and literary experimentation, as well as his complex personal life. Here are letters to new friends in North Africa and Eur-ope—partners in Burroughs’ expatriate life—including Paul Bowles, Ian Sommerville, Michael Portman, Alex Trocchi, and the surrealist artist Brion Gysin, who became a close confidant and whose “cut-up method” would deeply influence Burroughs’ writing. An intimate glimpse into the private life of an often misunderstood artist, Rub Out the Words is also an unforgettable portrait of one of the twentieth century’s most uncompromising literary personalities.

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.

In 1953, Burroughs began an expedition into the jungles of South America, ostensibly to find yage, the fabled hallucinogen of the Amazon. But Burroughs also cast his eye over the local regimes to record trademark vignettes of political and psychic malaise. The book was completed by the addition of Ginsberg's experiences with yage.

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.

Being the son of counter-culture author William S. Burroughs is bound to be a trial. After all, the man who frequented lesbian dives and had a fascination with firearms couldn''t possibly make that great of a father. Perhaps inevitably, William Jr. (called Billy) referred to himself as "cursed from birth" and in the book of the same name editor David Ohle collects parts of Billy''s third and unfinished novel Prakriti Junction, his last journals and poems, and correspondence and conversations to recreate this tortured life. Endowed with the sufferings — but not the patience — of Job, Billy''s life was often characterized by tragedy and frustration, although there were also pockets of success and levity. More than just the memoir of a casualty of the Beat Generation, Cursed From Birth provides rare insight in Billy''s father, as well as his scene, friends, and times. It also provides an all-too-familiar story of familial difficulties that anyone with difficult parents can understand and appreciate.

An unnerving tale of an addict adrift in New York, Tangiers and a nightmarish wasteland known as Interzone. The novel has exerted its influence on many authors regarding the relationship of art and obscenity, and on the shape of music, film, and media. This restored text includes editorial corrections and incorporates Burroughs' notes, and several essays he wrote over the years about the book.

Best known for the wild, phantasmagoric satire of works like Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs reveals another, gentler side in The Cat Inside. Originally published as a limited-edition volume, this moving and witty discourse on cats combines deadpan routines and dream passages with a heartwarming account of Burroughs''s unexpected friendships with the many cats he has known. It is also a meditation on the long, mysterious relationship between cats and their human hosts, which Burroughs traces back to the Egyptian cult of the "animal other." With its street sense and whiplash prose, The Cat Inside is a genuine revelation for Burroughs fans and cat lovers alike.

A collection of the interviews granted by William Burroughs, both published and unpublished, as well as conversations with writers, artists and musicians such as Tenessee Williams, Patti Smith and Keith Richards.

Although a rather shy, private man, William Burroughs gave a good many interviews during his lifetime, some in prominent publications, others in obscure forums. The interviews collected here provide an aperture into the philosophies, methods, and quirks of a man who wrote Queer, Junky, Naked Lunch, Nova Express, Cities of the Red Night, My Education, and many other works. When he died in 1997, Burroughs was likely one of the most widely recognizable figures in contemporary American literature. His image circulated on album jackets, in Nike commercials, and in films, as though proving his notion that pictures and words are viruses, invading any receptive host, taking hold, and replicating themselves. Not surprisingly, the topics Burroughs touches upon are wide-ranging: his relationships to the Beats, legends surrounding his personal life, drugs, gay liberation, collaboration, the cut-up technique, science fiction, politics, conspiracy theory, censorship, cats, guns, David Cronenberg''s movie adaptation of Naked Lunch, shotgun art, dreams, and life in Lawrence, Kansas, where he spent his last years. From these interviews emerges a full, undiluted portait of a writer who is difficult to capture in biography. Speaking of the Paris Review interview Alfred Kazin calls Burroughs "an engineer of the pen, a calmly interested specialist of the new processes. When Burroughs makes philosophic and scientific claims for his disorderly collections of data, we happily recognize under the externally calm surface of the interview, the kind of inner frenzy that is his genius--and which, in all of us, his books make an appeal." Kazin''s view applies as well for the other interviews in this collection. Allen Hibbard is an associate professor of English and the director of graduate studies at Middle Tennessee State University. He is the author of Paul Bowles: A Study of the Short Fiction and of many articles.

My Education is William S. Burroughs''s final collection, first published two years before his death in 1997. It is a book of dreams, written over several decades and as personal and 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 Sommerville, feeding his cats, procuring drugs or sex -- to the erotic, bizarre, and visionary. Always a rich source of imagery in Burroughs''s own fiction, in this book, dreams become a direct and powerful force in themselves. "Mr. Burroughs has lost none of his irreverence or wit, but in recent years he has acquired an elegant, elegiac tone." – The New York Times

"These funny, filthy, and terrifically smart letters reveal him in a way that no biographer can." -- New York Newsday Guru of the Beat generation, éminence grise of the international avant-garde, dark prophet, and blackest of satirists, William S. Burroughs has had a range of influence rivaled by few living writers. This volume of his correspondence from 1945 to 1959 vividly documents the personal and cultural history through which Burroughs developed, revealing clues to illuminate his life and keys to open up his texts. More than that, it shows how letter-writing was itself integral to his life and to his fiction. Beginning as surprisingly formal notes from the road to his friends Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, the letters deepen in substance and style. Then, in Tangier, comes a dramatic shift in voice and vision and the explosive, distinctive letters that will become Naked Lunch. Letters were lifelines for Burroughs, the outcast; and works-in-progress for Burroughs, the writer; and, they track his turbulent journey across two decades and three continents. To read them as they were written is to experience a unique merging of life and letters, the extraordinary story of Williams S. Burroughs homme de lettres. "Unrelenting impact." -- Los Angeles Reader

A good old-fashion shoot-out in the American West of the frontier days serves as the springboard for this hyperkinetic adventure in which gunslingers, led by Kim Carson, fight for galactic freedom." The Place of Dead Roads "is the second novel in the trilogy with "Cities of the Red Night" and" The Western Lands. "

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.

From the legendary author of Naked Lunch, the conclusion of his trilogy that includes Cities of the Red Night and Palace of Dead Roads The Western Land is legendary Beat writer William S. Burrough’s profound, revealing, and often astonishing meditation on morality, loneliness, life, and death -- a Book of the Dead for the nuclear age. "Burrough''s visionary power, his comic genius, and his unerring ability to crack the codes that make up the life of this century are undimished." -- J.G. Ballard, Washington Post Book World

"For more than three decades, while its writer''s world fame increased, Queer remained unpublished because of its forthright depiction of homosexual longings. Set in the corrupt and spectral Mexico City of the forties, Queer is the story of William Lee, a man afflicted with both acute heroin withdrawal and romantic and sexual yearnings for an indifferent user named Eugene Allerton."--Publisher.

A reprint of the controversial 1959 novel about narcotics addict Bill Lee, his travels in search of drugs, and his eventual descent into the nightmarish fantasy world of Interzone.

Written at a turning point in his life - when he was kicking drugs in Tangiers, writing Naked Lunch, and emerging from the literary underworld, these letters from Burroughs to his young friend Ginsberg are not only an intimate and diaristic account.

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.

"The mind-boggling story of a man whose alternate selves take him on a fantastic journey through space, time, and sexuality."--Back cover.

In this trenchant science-fiction screen treatment written in the mid-1970s, William S. Burroughs outlines the coming medical-care apocalypse: a Dante-esque horror show brought to a boil by a mutated virus and right-wing politics, set in a future all too near. The author of Naked Lunch, Junky, Port of Saints, Cities of the Red Night, Queer, and Exterminator treats this topical story in ultimate terms, with the dry, sophisticated humor he has mastered like no other modern writer.