William S. Burroughs

"The Soft Machine is Burroughs' original cut-up novel, first in an experimental trilogy that includes Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded. A surreal space-age odyssey and a total assault on the powers that turn humans into machines, the book draws the reader into an unmappable textual space where nothing is true and everyting is permitted"--Back cover.

In the summer of 1944, a shocking murder rocked the fledgling Beats. William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, both still unknown, we inspired by the crime to collaborate on a novel, a hard-boiled tale of bohemian New York during World War II, full of drugs and art, obsession and brutality, with scenes and characters drawn from their own lives. Finally published after more than sixty years, this is a captivating read, and incomparable literary artifact,...

"The most ferociously political and prophetic book of Burroughs's "cut-up" trilogy, Nova Express fires the reader into a textual outer space the better to see our burning planet and the operations of the Nova Mob in all their ugliness. As the new edition demonstrates, the shortest of the three books was cut by Burroughs from an extraordinary wealth of typescripts to create a visionary demand to take back the world that has been stolen from us. Edited...

Set in Mexico City during the early fifities, the story follows William Lee from bar to bar in the American expatriate scene as he pursues a young man named Allerton.

The Soft Machine introduced us to the conditions of a universe where endemic lusts of the mind and body prey upon men, hook them, and turn them into beasts. Nova Express takes William S. Burroughs's nightmarish futuristic tale one step further. The diabolical Nova Criminals, Sammy The Butcher, Green Tony, Iron Claws, The Brown Artist, Jacky Blue Note, Izzy The Push, to name only a few; have gained control and plan on wreaking untold destruction. It's...

Two seminal figures of the Beat movement, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs, discuss literary influences and personal history in a never-before-published three-day conversation following the release of the David Cronenberg film adaptation of Burroughs' revolutionary novel Naked Lunch. The visit coincided with the shamanic exorcism of the demon that Burroughs believed had caused him to fatally shoot his common law wife, Joan Vollmer Burroughs,...

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.

Since its original publication in Paris in 1959, Naked Lunch has become one of the most important novels of the twentieth century. Exerting its influence on the relationship of art and obscenity, it is one of the books that redefined not just literature but American culture. For the Burroughs enthusiast and the neophyte, this volume-that contains final-draft typescripts, numerous unpublished contemporaneous writings by Burroughs, his own later introductions...

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 sees wild boys engage in vigorous, ritualistic sex and drug taking, as well as prankster-ish guerrilla warfare and open combat with a confused and outmatched...