Product Description

A special 50th anniversary edition of the anarchic, phenomenally strong-selling classic from the godfather of the Beats, featuring the restored text, all the accompanying essays, and newly discovered material from the original manuscript. Welcome to Interzone! Say hello to Bradley the Buyer, the best narcotics agent in the business. Check yourself into the hospital where Dr Benway works -- but don't expect adrenalin if you need it (the night porter shot it up for kicks). Meet Dr 'Fingers' Schafer, the Lobotomy Kid, and his greatest creation, 'The Complete American De-anxietized Man', a marvel of invasive psychiatry who has been reduced to nothing but a spinal cord. Told by an Ivy League-educated narcotics addict, 'Naked Lunch' juxtaposes two journeys: the narrator's physical progress from America to North Africa, via Mexico, and a terrifying descent into his own altered consciousness. In this 'Interzone', loosely based on Burroughs' temporary home of Tangier, sex, drugs and murder are the most basic of commodities, and the basest desires have become completely banal. Provocative, influential, morbidly fascinating and mordantly funny, 'Naked Lunch' takes us on an exhilarating ride through the darkest recesses of the human psyche -- a ride which stunned the literary world when first published in the repressed 1950s, and is still guaranteed to epater more than a few bourgeois. Over forty years since first publication, Burroughs scholar Barry Miles and Burroughs' longtime editor James Grauerholz have compiled this definitive restored text, correcting numerous errors that have accumulated over the years, and incorporating all of Burroughs' notes and accompanying essays. Most exciting of all, this edition includes an appendix of newly discovered, never before seen material -- including alternate drafts from the original manuscript and letters from Burroughs' private correspondence.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9584 in Books
• Published on: 2009-06-25
• Format: Special Edition
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Review
'A true genius and first mythographer of the mid-twentieth century, William Burroughs is the lineal successor to James Joyce. "Naked Lunch" is a banquet you will never forget.' JG Ballard 'Prophesied with unerring accuracy the hideous modes that human behaviour would assume in the post-apocalyptic second half of the twentieth century. "Naked Lunch" is essential reading for anyone who maintains any illusions about anything.' Will Self 'William Burroughs broadened people's conception of what makes humanity. In that way, he really was an American hero, a hero writer, and also just a great man.' Lou Reed 'A delirious exploration of sexual violence through the art of collage.' Time Out

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'. Originally published by the daring and influential Olympia Press (the original publishers of Henry Miller) in France in 1959, it aroused great controversy on publication and was not available in the US until 1962 and in the UK until 1964. The book was adapted for film by David Cronenberg in 1991.

Customer Reviews

Small doses before bed may work best
Imagine you were able to recall all the weird dreams and nightmares you ever had in clear, vivid detail; taking in sights, smells, feelings, and those odd moments when the dream changes completely, but still - inconceivably, but somehow rationally - connected to the events of the moment before. Imagine you are a hopeless heroin addict, having sleeping and waking dreams compounded by an addict's hallucinations and paranoid excursions, often perceiving things through a trancelike psychosis. Imagine you have a pen in your hand. You've imagined William Burroughs disturbed, distorted and dreamlike prose. You've imagined what Naked Lunch would look and sound like.

That's my take on this almost impenetrable novel. It's fairly short by today's standards, but like old fashioned toffee - extremely chewy, time consuming and ultimately frustrating in all but small chunks. If the Naked Chef stripped down recipes to their bare essentials, then Naked Lunch is the complete opposite; a gorge-fest of dense, lyrical prose and vivid images melded together to form a collage around the subjects of addiction, sexual fascination and satire of the medical profession.

I gather this book doesn't employ the cut'n'paste narrative experiments of his later work, because with this book there is no coherent narrative. Yes, you could take any of these pages and put them pretty much anywhere and they would still make as much sense. But the cut up method implies a structured (but merely fragmented) narrative as many of us would know it. Naked Lunch is not like this. It is more random, flicking off onto tangents, as dreams do.

Does the sum of these Frankenstein parts add up to a meaningful whole? Well, that depends on what you enjoy in a book. If you enjoy prose loaded with lyrical dexterity, lurid images and simile; constant bemusement, and re-reading sentences because they seem unrelated to each other, with unconnected thoughts and images from one moment to the next - you may enjoy this book. Burroughs has a way with images, if nothing else. But if you are used to more conventional writing and narrative - a story even - then, like me, you may find it a frustrating experience. If James Joyce was a junkie, he would probably have written something like Naked Lunch first.

But I could not leave it alone, and persevered in small portions. The writing is intriguing and the images fascinating, but I was only 2-3 pages in when I wondered when the weirdness would stop and a book would begin. Maybe that is the triumph of Burroughs' work, that many will read it in spite of its avant garde nature. For those who find it heavy going, 'Junky', written earlier, may help. It foreshadows the style and experiences employed in Naked Lunch, but has a conventional narrative and gives some useful background to Burroughs' psyche, before he completely tripped out.

Bug-powder dust & mugwump jism!
'Naked Lunch'(title courtesy of Jack Kerouac)is one of the key works of the 20th century...It is a reason why J G Ballard called Burroughs 'the lineal succesor to James Joyce' (tho' it is more readable than 'Finnegans Wake'!)...Along with the almost-straightforward autobiographies 'Junky' & 'Queer', 'N.L.' is the ideal introduction to Burroughs oeuvre.

This novel charts the underworld, the lowlife- mostly in a manner we have not seen before...Written in Tangiers, edited by Allen Ginsberg, this is a Beat-artefact and an advance for the form of the novel on a par with Beckett & B S Johnson...It is also darkly amusing, though you may want to dip in and out, rather than read it like a conventional novel...It would initiate Burrough's use of Gysin's cut-up method and lead us to such excellent succesors as 'The Soft Machine' & 'The Ticket that Exploded' (the true cut-up works)...It would influence film-makers (Cronenberg, Roeg) & pop-stars (David Bowie, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, David Bowie...)...It picks up & distorts the road created by 'Tropic of Cancer', 'Hunger', 'The Man with the Golden Arm', 'The Subterraneans', 'Our Lady of the Flowers', 'The Sheltering Sky', 'Howl' and so many other screaming texts...Even if you don't like it, you'll like it: at this price it would be a great loss not to own this masterpiece...

Read it only to see why writers like Irvine Welsh are p***ing in the wind, when writing on the topic of drugs...Burrough's writes for the future, in a futurist manner: Annexia is the ultimate fusion of Kafka & Orwell...

A classic... "Wouldn't you?"

Scary yet Fantastical
I read this book, not knowing much about the author. The cover just drew me to it, (I know, books, covers, you shouldn't judge, but I couldn't help it). When I started reading it I thought, 'what?', but then I just couldn't put it down. I think it's probably a very good insight into the mind of a heroine addict, I can't be 100% sure on that as I am not a heroine addict, and I have to say that this book makes me very glad that I'm not. It is exceptionally dark in places and very grusome, messy even, but there are some very funny bits too. Read it now!