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.

A collection of the interviews granted by William Burroughs, both published and unpublished, as well as conversations with writers, artists and musicians such as Tenessee Williams, Patti Smith and Keith Richards.

An intense, compelling conversation between legendary Beat icons William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, featuring photos by Ginsberg, and details of Burroughs' shamanic exorcism of the demon that led him to shoot his wife and drove his work as a writer.

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.

William Burroughs’ work was dedicated to an assault upon language, traditional values and all agents of control. Produced at a time when he was at his most extreme and messianic, The Job lays out his abrasive, incisive, paranoiac, maddened and maddening worldview in interviews interspersed with stories and other writing. On the Beat movement, the importance of the cut-up technique, the press, Scientology, capital punishment, drugs, good and evil, the destruction of nations, Deadly Orgone Radiation and whether violence just in words is violence enough – Burroughs’ insights show why he was one of the most influential writers and one of the sharpest, most startling and strangest minds of his generation.

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.

This definitive book on Burroughs’ decades-long cut-up project and its relevance to the American twentieth century, including previously unpublished works. William S. Burroughs’s Nova Trilogy (The Soft Machine, Nova Express, and The Ticket That Exploded) remains the best-known of his textual cut-up creations, but he committed more than a decade of his life to searching out multimedia for use in works of collage. By cutting up, folding in, and splicing together newspapers, magazines, letters, book reviews, classical literature, audio recordings, photographs, and films, Burroughs created an eclectic and wide-ranging countercultural archive. This collection includes previously unpublished work by Burroughs such as cut-ups of work written by his son, cut-ups of critical responses to his own work, collages on the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, excerpts from his dream journals, and some of the few diary entries that Burroughs wrote about his wife, Joan. William S. Burroughs Cutting Up the Century also features original essays, interviews, and discussions by established Burroughs scholars, respected artists, and people who encountered Burroughs. The essays consider Burroughs from a range of perspectives—literary studies, media studies, popular culture, gender studies, post-colonialism, history, and geography. “A landmark in scholarship.” —Choice