Download or read book Literary Outlaw The Life and Times of William S Burroughs written by Ted Morgan and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2012-07-31 with total page 753 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Almost indecently readable . . . captures [Burroughs’s] destructive energy, his ferocious pessimism, and the renegade brilliance of his style.”—Vogue With a new preface as well as a final chapter on William S. Burroughs’s last years, the acclaimed Literary Outlaw is the only existing full biography of an extraordinary figure. Anarchist, heroin addict, alcoholic, and brilliant writer, Burroughs was the patron saint of the Beats. His avant-garde masterpiece Naked Lunch shook up the literary world with its graphic descriptions of drug abuse and illicit sex—and resulted in a landmark Supreme Court ruling on obscenity. Burroughs continued to revolutionize literature with novels like The Soft Machine and to shock with the events in his life, such as the accidental shooting of his wife, which haunted him until his death. Ted Morgan captures the man, his work, and his friends—Allen Ginsberg and Paul Bowles among them—in this riveting story of an iconoclast.
Download or read book Cursed from Birth written by William S. Burroughs. Jr. and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2006-08-23 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Last Words written by William S. Burroughs and published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs is the most intimate book ever written by William S. Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch and one of the most celebrated literary outlaws of our time. Laid out as diary entries of the last nine months of Burroughs's life, Last Words spans the realms of cultural criticism, personal memoir, and fiction. Classic Burroughs concerns -- literature, U.S. drug policy, the state of humanity, his love for his cats -- permeate the book. Most significantly, Last Words contains some of the most personal work Burroughs has ever written, a final reckoning with his life and regrets, and his reflections on the deaths of his friends Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary. It is a poignant portrait of the man, his life, and his creative process -- one that never quit, not even in the shadow of death.
Download or read book Word Virus written by William S. Burroughs and published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 572 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book William S Burroughs and the Cult of Rock n Roll written by Casey Rae and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2021-10-05 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William S. Burroughs's fiction and essays are legendary, but his influence on music's counterculture has been less well documented—until now. Examining how one of America's most controversial literary figures altered the destinies of many notable and varied musicians, William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock 'n' Roll reveals the transformations in music history that can be traced to Burroughs. A heroin addict and a gay man, Burroughs rose to notoriety outside the conventional literary world; his masterpiece, Naked Lunch, was banned on the grounds of obscenity, but its nonlinear structure was just as daring as its content. Casey Rae brings to life Burroughs's parallel rise to fame among daring musicians of the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, when it became a rite of passage to hang out with the author or to experiment with his cut-up techniques for producing revolutionary lyrics (as the Beatles and Radiohead did). Whether they tell of him exploring the occult with David Bowie, providing Lou Reed with gritty depictions of street life, or counseling Patti Smith about coping with fame, the stories of Burroughs's backstage impact will transform the way you see America's cultural revolution—and the way you hear its music.
Download or read book Queer written by William S. Burroughs and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2022-09-06 with total page 135 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The definitive text of William S. Burroughs’s early, long-unpublished novel, reissued on the seventieth anniversary of the year of its writing, set to be adapted for film directed by Luca Guadagnino and starring Daniel Craig Originally written in 1952 but not published till 1985, Queer is a haunting tale of possession and exorcism. Both an unflinching autobiographical self-portrait and a coruscatingly political novel, it is both Burroughs’s only realist love story and a montage of comic-grotesque fantasies that paved the way for his masterpiece, Naked Lunch. Set in Mexico City during the early fifties, Queer follows William Lee, the protagonist of Burroughs’s debut novel Junky, a man afflicted with acute heroin withdrawal and romantic yearnings for Eugene Allerton. As Lee breaks down over the course of his hopeless pursuit of desire from bar to bar in the American expatriate scene, the trademark Burroughsian voice emerges, a maniacal mix of self-lacerating humor and the ugly American at his ugliest. Now a cult classic and a highly regarded part of his oeuvre, reissued on the seventieth anniversary of the year of its writing, this edition of Queer features a contextualizing introduction by the eminent Burroughs scholar Oliver Harris.
Download or read book William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination written by Harris, Oliver and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book William S Burroughs vs The Qur an written by Michael Muhammad Knight and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2012-04-17 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Michael Muhammad Knight sets out to write the definitive biography of his “Anarcho-Sufi” hero and mentor, writer Peter Lamborn Wilson (aka Hakim Bey), he makes a startling discovery that changes everything. At the same time that he grows disillusioned with his idol, Knight finds that his own books have led to American Muslim youths making a countercultural idol of him, placing him on the same pedestal that he had given Wilson. In an attempt to forge his own path, Knight pledges himself to an Iranian Sufi order that Wilson had almost joined, attempts to write the Great American Queer Islamo-Futurist Novel, and even creates his own mosque in the wilderness of West Virginia. He also employs the “cut-up” writing method of Bey’s friend, the late William S. Burroughs, to the Qur’an, subjecting Islam’s holiest scripture to literary experimentation. William S. Burroughs vs. the Qur’an is the struggle of a hero-worshiper without heroes and the meeting of religious and artistic paths, the quest of a writer as spiritual seeker.
Download or read book Interzone written by William S. Burroughs and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1990-02-01 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Wild Boys written by William S. Burroughs and published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Rub Out the Words written by William S. Burroughs and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2012-02-07 with total page 817 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Soft Machine written by William S. Burroughs and published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. This book was released on 2011-02-24 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Call Me Burroughs written by Barry Miles and published by Twelve. This book was released on 2014-01-28 with total page 676 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fifty years ago, Norman Mailer asserted, "William Burroughs is the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius." Few since have taken such literary risks, developed such individual political or spiritual ideas, or spanned such a wide range of media. Burroughs wrote novels, memoirs, technical manuals, and poetry. He painted, made collages, took thousands of photographs, produced hundreds of hours of experimental recordings, acted in movies, and recorded more CDs than most rock bands. Burroughs was the original cult figure of the Beat Movement, and with the publication of his novel Naked Lunch, which was originally banned for obscenity, he became a guru to the 60s youth counterculture. In Call Me Burroughs, biographer and Beat historian Barry Miles presents the first full-length biography of Burroughs to be published in a quarter century-and the first one to chronicle the last decade of Burroughs's life and examine his long-term cultural legacy. Written with the full support of the Burroughs estate and drawing from countless interviews with figures like Allen Ginsberg, Lucien Carr, and Burroughs himself, Call Me Burroughs is a rigorously researched biography that finally gets to the heart of its notoriously mercurial subject.
Download or read book Burroughs Live written by William S. Burroughs and published by Semiotext(e). This book was released on 2001 with total page 860 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Western Lands written by William S. Burroughs and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1988-12-07 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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
Download or read book The Letters of William S Burroughs written by William S. Burroughs and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1994-06-01 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "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
Download or read book William S Burroughs at the Front written by Jennie Skerl and published by Carbondale : Southern Illinois University Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jennie Skerl and Robin Lydenberg have selected twenty-five critical essays on Burroughs that reflect the historical reception of his work, both positive and negative, decade by decade, and that represent the best essays written about him. The essays cover Burroughs' major novels--including the cut-up and new trilogies--the censorship issue, and his work in film and painting. The chronological organization brings into critical focus the shift from moral questions raised by the novels' content, through examinations of Burroughs' relationship to humanism and modernism, and finally to more focused literary and linguistic issues. In their introduction, the editors survey the progress of Burroughs' critical reception and examine the reasons for the varied and intense responses to the work and the theoretical assumptions behind those responses. The reviewers include prominent figures such as Mary McCarthy and Marshall McLuhan as well as major academic critics such as Cary Nelson, Tony Tanner, and Ihab Hassan.
