Word Virus
The William S. Burroughs Reader
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4.5 • 4 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The deadpan granddad of postmodernism is well represented in this bountiful collection of fiction, essays and collaborations from all stages of Burroughs's (1914-1997) long career. Burroughs's companion, longtime editor and literary executor Grauerholz, and Grove editor Silverberg include selections from the writer's better-known works, as well as sections of the experimental "cut-up" novels--complete enough to give readers a feel for the form without exhausting those unaccustomed to Burroughs's disjointed sharpness. Dark humor runs throughout the collection, from the 1938 collaboration "Twilight's Last Gleamings," in which the cross-dressing captain of a sinking ship murders his way onto a lifeboat, to a wry account of Burroughs's stint as a cockroach exterminator. What may prove most valuable to readers is the inclusion of Burroughs's commentary on his aims and intent. "Remembering Jack Kerouac" recalls the way the younger Kerouac prodded Burroughs to write. In the manifesto "Les Voleurs," Burroughs celebrates "stealing" words, a cure for "the fetish of originality." Perhaps most surprising are the passages both melancholic and elegiac, such as this, from The Western Lands: "A tree like black-lace against a gray sky. A flash of joy." In a selection from My Education, Burroughs provides an apt description for this collection: "Each page is a door to everything is permitted."
