"Sheer pleasure. . . . Wonderfully entertaining."--Chicago Sun-Times Acclaimed by Norman Mailer more than twenty years ago as "possibly the only American writer of genius," William S. Burroughs has produced a body of work unique in our time. In these scintillating essays, he writes wittily and wisely about himself, his interests, his influences, his friends and foes. He offers candid and not always flattering assessments of such diverse writers as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Samuel Beckett, and Marcel Proust. He ruminates on science and the often dubious paths into which it seems intent on leading us, whether into outer or inner space. He reviews his reviewers, explains his famous "cut-up" method, and discusses the role coincidence has played in his life and work. As satirist and parodist, William Burroughs has no peer, as these varied works, written over three decades, amply reveal.

Through critical readings Gerald Alva Miller, Jr., examines the life of William S. Burroughs and the evolution of his various radical styles not just in writing but also in audio, film, and painting. Although Burroughs remains tied to the Beat Generation, his works prove more revolutionary. Miller argues that Burroughs, more than any other author, ushered in the era of both postmodern fiction and poststructural philosophy. Through this study Miller situates Burroughs within the larger countercultural movements that began in the 1950s, when his novels became influential because of their examination of various control systems (from sex and drugs to global or even intergalactic conspiracies). Understanding William S. Burroughs begins by considering his early, straightforward narratives. Despite being more stylistically conventional, they broke new ground with their depictions of junkies, gay people, and others marginalized by society. The publication of Naked Lunch shattered all literary paradigms in terms of form and content. Naked Lunch and the cut-up novels, recordings, films, and art that followed constitute one of the twentieth century's most sustained and methodical aesthetic experiments, placing Burroughs alongside Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov, and Thomas Pynchon in terms of both innovation and influence. Burroughs eventually turned his attention toward imagining methods of using the control "machinery" against itself. Often considered his masterpiece, the Red Night Trilogy of the 1980s ranges across time and space, and life and death, in its quest to discover the ultimate form of freedom. His antiestablishment stance and virulent attacks on various types of oppression have caused Burroughs to remain a highly influential figure to each new generation of authors, artists, musicians, and philosophers. The hippies, punks, and cyberpunks were all heavily indebted to the man whom many people called el hombre invisible, and his works prove more relevant than ever in the twenty-first century.

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.

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 this poignant portrait of the man, his life, and the creative process.

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.

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.

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.