Product Description

The Burroughs' book which, with 'The Soft Machine' and 'Nova Express', completes the classic 'Cut-Up Trilogy'. 'Earth was under attack, but by whom? The Insect People of Minraud? The Nova Mob? The "White Hunters"? Representatives of Hassan i Sabbah or the White Goddess?' 'Language is the worn coin pressed silently into my hand. Inspector J. Lee of the Nova Police knew them by many names -- but he only knew one way to stop them.' 'The only weapon was silence: silence to say goodbye -- by silence to say good. "You see, gentlemen, what we call history is the history of the word -- and the word is a killer virus!"' A prophetic vision of a world in which technology has gone haywire, 'The Ticket that Exploded' completes Burroughs' classic 'Cut-Up Trilogy'.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #329865 in Books
• Published on: 2001-09-17
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 176 pages

Review
'The fold-in technique gives excellent comic and satiric results!cleverly combines the raw energy of lowbrow spy- and science fiction with the brutal unfamiliarity of hardcore pornography.' Spectator 'His Swiftian vision of a processed, pre-packaged life, a kind of electro-chemical totalitarianism, often evokes the black laughter of hilarious horror.' Playboy

Spectator
"The fold-in technique gives excellent comic and satiric results
... cleverly combines the raw energy of lowbrow `spy' and `science' fiction
with the brutal unfamiliarity of `hard core' pornography."

About the Author
William Burroughs was born in St Louis, Missouri in 1914. Immensely influential among the Beat writers of the 1950s -- notably Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg -- he already had an underground reputation before the appearance of his first important book, 'Naked Lunch'. William Burroughs died in 1997.

Customer Reviews

Poetry of the Absurd
This is my favourite of all Burroughs' novels. The whole book is crackling with ideas and the cut-up technique seems to reveal a strange kind of poetry. I certainly found this easier to read than Naked Lunch. Very haunting and stays with you long after you've finished reading. Very highly recommended. Pick any page at random and you will see the beauty through the chaos.

one weird bizarre galactic ADVENTURE
this book is an outerlandish(outer space) type of bizarre nuclear book... it has what few books lack visual impact, and adventure..and keeps exploding with action (unlike few books that stick to one place for a million hours..and emotions, it jumps countlessly with entertainment and never fails at that.

Reissue of a classic
'The Ticket that Exploded' is one of Burroughs best works and I think one of his most approachable!...Older academic writing on Burroughs classifies it as part of a trilogy, following 'Naked Lunch' & 'The Soft Machine' (reading both these prior can help!). The recent 'Word Virus' reader (highly reccomended) puts 'Naked Lunch' in an interzone section- as it was not a 'cut up' in the Gysin-sense (like Bowles 'The Sheltering Sky'). Here 'The Ticket that Exploded' is considered part of a 'cut-up'-trilogy with 'The Soft Machine' & 'Nova Express'- which does make more sense- as later books like 'The Wild Boys' & 'Cities of the Red Night' would be,er, slightly more conventional.

'The Ticket that Exploded' uses the cut-up form, Burroughs notion of recording elements on tape and creating alternate selves (not far from Beckett's 'Krapp's Last Tape'). It is a SF-book, his most obvious SF-book- though it explores the 'inner space' established by JG Ballard (a longtime fan). It is about 'Operation Other-half'- 'Operation Rewrite'- 'The word'- the word is now a virus, as a sexual parasite takes over the body- we meet Johnny Yen again ("hypnotizing chickens") and green Venusian-boy-girls...This book has to be read- while seemingly constructed from nonsense it makes complete horrific blackly amusing sense- inserting themes that would be continued in later works- such as Gysin's theory that the word would lead to our extinction or that 490,000 years previously humans had wiped themselves out with nuclear arms in the Gobi desert- the language is a more approachable continuation of what Joyce was doing towards the end of 'Ulysses' and in the unreadable 'Finnegans Wake-Ballard states in 'A User's Guide to the Millennium' that he considers Burroughs to be Joyce's lineal succesor- which rings true reading this- Excepting the conventional 'Junky' & 'Queer', I think both this and 'The Wild Boys' are the easiest Burroughs to read- though all of his major works ought to be read- Come and read about the invisible generation, the Nova Police and Operation Rewrite- a great imaginative tome up there with the madness of PK Dick's 'Valis'- the ticket that exploded- and has there been anything better than the section from 'Combat troops in the area'- the rain of images- a snowfall of pictures-"Word falling-Photo falling-Time falling-Towers, open fire" - this may not be literature as you know it- but it is among the best writing of the 20th century-into thin air.