Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #70778 in Books
• Published on: 1986-11-20
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

Synopsis
The anarchic, phenomenally strong-selling classic from the godfather of the Beats: revitalised with a cool new jacket. WELCOME TO INTERZONE...Say hello to Bradley the Buyer, the best narcotics agent in the business. Attend international playboy A.J.'s annual party, where the punch is to be treated with extreme caution. Meet Dr 'Fingers' Schafer, the Lobotomy Kid and his giant centipede, 'The Complete American De-anxietized Man.' And enter the dark and infernal mind of Bill Lee as he pursues his daily quest for the ultimate merchandise...Provocative, influential, morbidly fascinating, Naked Lunch is an apocalyptic ride through the darker recesses of the human psyche.

Customer Reviews

The emperors new clothes
I read Junky and really enjoyed it, it is written by a man in control of his thoughts, reflecting on times when he wasn't.
I bought this book and quite literally threw it in the bin after the first 40 or so pages. Perhaps if you persevere with it..... well,I couldn't. It starts with nonsensical drug babble and random paedophile fantasy. If thats clever writing, I don't see how. If the rest of the book continues in that vein then what can anyone possibly get out of reading it? Perhaps it gets better, I wasn't willing to find out. If you want drug babble, why not take some drugs and create your own? in my experience your own babble is far more interesting.

Cold Turkey
I received this as a gift and initially I was enthusiastic about reading it, being interested in all things psychadelic. However this book reads like a disgusting, terror-filled comedown from a heroin, LSD and Ecstacy cocktail. It seems each line is written for shock value alone, and it usually ends with some sort of allusion to power, human depravity or homosexuality, forced or otherwise. If you want to follow what's going on you really have to concentrate hard, and it's hardly rewarding to bother, cos nothing is really going on, just the images and thoughts in the head of a drug addict, all running into each other without a pattern. If you want to take a trip down the 'darkest recesses of the human psyche' then you'd be better off writing down the words of a back-alley junkie, it would be far more coherent. The only thing of interest is Burrough's explanation of how he got himself off heroin, and that this successful technique is still ignored. But two or three pages can't save a book.

Don't expect satisfaction on a conventional level
Cut to the chase

This is not so much a novel as a sumation of all that is dark about humanity and sexuality, reduced over an intense fire of 'corrupted' intelligence to a black morass of putrifaction and, strangely, moral nutrality. The fact there is no real plot and all characters are at best two dimensional is irrelevant. Enjoy.