Product Description

A man, dispirited by ageing, endeavours to steal a younger man’s face; a doctor yearns for a virus that might eliminate his discomfort by turning everyone else into doubles of himself; a Colonel lays out the precepts of the life of DE (Do Easy); conspirators posthumously succeed in blowing up a train full of nerve gas; a mandrill known as the Purple Better One runs for the presidency with brutal results; and the world drifts towards apocalypses of violence, climate and plague. The hallucinatory landscape of William Burroughs’ compellingly bizarre, fragmented novel is constantly shifting, something sinister always just beneath the surface.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #189591 in Books
• Published on: 2008-11-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 176 pages

About the Author
William S. Burroughs was born on February 5, 1914 in St Louis. In work and in life Burroughs expressed a lifelong subversion of the morality, politics and economics of modern America. To escape those conditions, and in particular his treatment as a homosexual and a drug-user, Burroughs left his homeland in 1950, and soon after began writing. By the time of his death he was widely recognised as one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the twentieth century. His numerous books include Naked Lunch, Junky, Queer, Nova Express, Interzone, The Wild Boys, The Ticket That Exploded and The Soft Machine. After living in Mexico City, Tangier, Paris, and London, Burroughs finally returned to America in 1974. He died in 1997.

Customer Reviews

Naked Hunch
In none of the other of Burroughs' novels are his political and social intuitions laid out with so much candour. In parts this 'novel' is a barely disguised manifesto against the hypocrisies of the world, and at other times a light (!) and effective collection of 'routines'. The book is inhabited by the usual collection of incarnations of Burroughs himself, camp officials, murderous doctors and a masturbating baboon for U.S. president. Throughout, and despite all this familiar chaos, the book has an ordered feel and is actually a delicately balanced exploration of Burroughs' favourite themes: drugs, sexuality and control. The absence of a singular narrative is, as usual, incidental, the author having preferred to develop the book solely along the lines of its substance. Exterminator, as one would expect, does veer into the realm of the obtusely abstract at times, but for once this adds to Burroughs' intrigue and the sense that you're getting something just a little bit deep.

bits and pieces of the genius
As fragmentation was always Burroughs trademark, this collection of short stories or pieces of prose and some poems fits in with the whole of his oeuvre perfectly well, because it sheds light on some dark passages of his earlier work. Moreover it is essential in that it contains some of his most lyrical prose, the tale of the Priest has a transcending beauty resembling that of Joyce's The Dead. Where in the Wild Boys his straightforward attempts at more traditional writing failed occasionaly in blending with his experimental voice for which he is so renown, here they serve as counterpoints that have their own mysterious power, be it that there are also traces of the writers block that was building up inside of Burroughs round the time this was published. It was not before Places of the Dead Roads that he would fully realize and bring to bloom the possibilities created by this endeavour, although in a way this book can be seen as a try out for his epical masterpiece Cities of the Red Night that lacks the flow of the phrases that shine from the pages of this flawed gem.

Sensational Vietnam War-era literature.
This book is a period piece, but man, what a period piece. Essentially a collection of short stories surrounding the "revolution" of the 1960s, Burroughs tears into the Military, the Right, the morality police, the War on Drugs, technology, and politics. Each story uses Burroughs's violent fantasy to tell a morality tale and bring each target of his ire into sharp relief before tearing it down utterly. Not as chilling as Naked Lunch or as sweeping as Cities of the Red Night. A good book for someone who is just getting started reading Burroughs.