Through it all Burroughs eludes easy literary classifications by turns he is poststructuralist Dashiell Hammett, T.S. He stretches modernist forms and grammar like narrative silly putty, prefiguring the sly mischief of postmodern writers such as Thomas Pynchon and William Gibson. Apocalyptic, carnal and raw, Burroughs’ work bridges the epiphanies of modernism with the Foucaultian cool of postmodernism. In their selections, editors James Grauerholz and Ira Silverberg highlight the many faces of Burroughs: the narrative pioneer, the sardonic stand-up, the asexual Tiresias-like seer, and, in what may be a surprise to many, the humanist. Burroughs Reader finally brings the author’s actual writing back to the forefront. For Burroughs virgins and devotees alike.” – Details “The best of the late gentleman junkie’s literary arsenal. When he died in the summer of 1997, the world of letters lost its most elegant outsider. Throughout a life that spanned the better part of the twentieth century, William Burroughs managed to be a visionary among writers: he imagined the Internet decades before its appearance and peered into the future of other technologies, kept the pace of world affairs and cultural trends, and, with each of his books, introduced new possibilities for the form. Ann Douglas’s introductory essay provides further background on Burroughs in the context of American letters and his Beat contemporaries. Important biographical information, contained in the chapter introductions, provide key links to understanding the work in the context of the life. Burroughs Reader follows major themes in Burroughs’ oeuvre while also serving up a sampling of his darkly hilarious “routines,” and is edited to serve as a tool for the scholar as well as an overview of his entire body of work for the general reader.

Burroughs Reader brings together selections of Burroughs’ most important and challenging work”beginning with his very early writing (including a chapter from his and Jack Kerouac’s never-before-seen collaborative novel, And The Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks) and following his trajectory through My Education: A Book of Dreams. With the publication of Naked Lunch in 1959, William Burroughs brought international letters into the postmodern age, but he had already begun to chart the course that would establish him as one of postwar America’s most influential writers.

ჯანქი by William S. Burroughs