Following The Soft Machine, this second novel from William S. Burroughs's Cut-Up Trilogy continues the adventures of Inspector Lee in his mission to investigate and subvert the methods of mind control being used by the Nova Mob. Here Burroughs explores his idea of language as a virus, and employs the "fold-in" method--a variation of his "cut-up" technique--to produce a vision of a world in which technology has gone haywire. One of the original and most influential Beat writers, Burroughs created spontaneous writing by cutting up existing manuscripts and randomly rearranging them. In the early 1960s, following the publication of his scandalous novel Naked Lunch, Burroughs embarked on what would be called the Cut-Up Trilogy or the Nova Trilogy, producing three novels that follow an agent named Lee and his encounters with members of the Nova Mob."In Mr. Burroughs's hands, writing reverts to acts of magic, as though he were making some enormous infernal encyclopedia of all the black impulses and acts that, once made, would shut the fiends away forever."--NYTimes

The Ticket That Exploded

Literature & Fiction

BURROUGHS, WILLIAM

Literary

Fourth Estate

The Place of Dead Roads

A controversial reworking of well-trodden American myth by the author of ‘Naked Lunch’.
This surreal fable, set in America’s Old West, features a cast of notorious characters: The Crying Gun, who breaks into tears at the sight of his opponent; The Priest, who goes into gunfights giving his adversaries the last rites; and The Nihilistic Kid himself, Kim Carson, who, with a succession of beautiful sidekicks, sets out to challenge the morality of small-town America.
Fantastical and humorous, ‘The Place of Dead Roads’ continues William Burroughs’ exploration of society’s controlling forces – the State, the Church, women, literature, drugs – with a style that is utterly unique in twentieth-century literature.

Humor & Satire

William Burroughs was one of post-war America’s most controversial and influential writers. This is the authoritative, indispensable anthology of his greatest work.
Beginning early in William Burroughs’ career with ‘Junky’, ‘Queer’ and a novel co-authored with Jack Kerouac, ‘Word Virus’ follows his trajectory through the major novels – including ‘Naked Lunch’ – to his final book, ‘My Education’, a series of meditations on his own extraordinary dream life.
Biographical prefaces to each chapter, and an introductory essay by Beat historian Ann Douglas, provide invaluable context to this collection of the very best of William Burroughs, a unique and visionary writer.

Word Virus: The William Burroughs Reader

Contemporary

Excellent biography of Manfred von Richthofen, the "Red Baron" WWI's highest scoring flying ace, whose usefulness to the Fatherland was sadly more valuable dead than alive. Author Burrows has delivered a well-researched, well-written portrait of Germany's young Prussian flying ace. A must-read for any history buff.

Richthofen: A True History of the Red Baron

History

Military

Harcourt, Brace and Co.

The last words of Dutch Schultz

Dramas & Plays

CAPE GOLIARD

My Education is Burroughs's last novel, first published two years before his death in 1997. It is a book of dreams, collected over several decades and as 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.

My Education: A Book of Dreams

Biographies & Memoirs

VIKING

In The Ticket That Exploded, William S. Burroughs' grand "cut-up" trilogy that starts with The Soft Machine and continues through Nova Express reaches its climax as inspector Lee and the Nova Police engage the Nova Mob in a decisive battle for the planet. Only Burroughs could make such a nightmare vision of scientists and combat troops, of ad men and con men whose deceitful language has spread like an incurable disease be at once so frightening and so enthralling.

Ticket That Exploded

Random House~trade

Shows how lasers work and how they are used in holography, communications, fusion systems, long distance measurement, and weaponry

Lasers (Understanding Science)

Children's Books

Franklin Watts

Soft Machine

LGBTQ+ Books

BANTAM DOUBLEDAY @ DELL

Naked Lunch

"He was," as Salon'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."      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 Naked Lunch 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.   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 Naked Lunch 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 Naked Lunch is its America-bashing, replete with slang and vitriol. Read it  and see for yourself.

Bt Bound

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