Naked Lunch [Hardcover]

William S. Burroughs (Author), David Ulin (Introduction)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1, 2009

Naked Lunch is one of the most important novels of the twentieth century, a book that redefined not just literature but American culture. An unnerving tale of a narcotics addict unmoored in New York, Tangiers, and ultimately a nightmarish wasteland known as interzone, its formal innovation, formerly taboo subject matter, and tour de force execution have exerted their influence on the work of authors like Thomas Pynchon, J. G. Ballard, and William Gibson; on the relationship of art and obscenity; and on the shape of music, film and media generally. Naked Lunch: The Restored Text includes many editorial corrections on the text, several essays he wrote over the years about the book, and an appendix of 20 percent new material and alternate drafts from the original manuscript, which predates the first published version. For the Burroughs enthusiast and the neophyte, this volume is a valuable and fresh experience of this classic of our culture.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"He was," as Salon's Gary Kamyia notes, "20th-century drug culture's Poe, its Artaud, its Baudelaire. He was the prophet of the literature of pure experience, a phenomenologist of dread.... Burroughs had the scary genius to turn the junk wasteland into a parallel universe, one as thoroughly and obsessively rendered as Blake's."

Why has this homosexual ex-junkie, whose claim to fame rests entirely on one book--the hallucinogenic ravings of a heroin addict--so seized the collective imagination? Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch in a Tangier, Morocco, hotel room between 1954 and 1957. Allen Ginsberg and his beatnik cronies burst onto the scene, rescued the manuscript from the food-encrusted floor, and introduced some order to the pages. It was published in Paris in 1959 by the notorious Olympia Press and in the U.S. in 1962; the landmark obscenity trial that ensued served to end literary censorship in America.

Burroughs's literary experiment--the much-touted "cut-up" technique--mirrored the workings of a junkie's brain. But it was junk coupled with vision: Burroughs makes teeming amalgam of allegory, sci-fi, and non-linear narration, all wrapped in a blend of humor--slapstick, Swiftian, slang-infested humor. What is Naked Lunch about? People turn into blobs amidst the sort of evil that R. Crumb, in the decades to come, would inimitably flesh out with his dark and creepy cartoon images. Perhaps the most easily grasped part of Naked Lunch is its America-bashing, replete with slang and vitriol. Read it and see for yourself. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

William S. Burroughs's classic tale has been fully restored by his longtime editors, Grauerholz and Miles, and is invigorated by this enthusiastic reading. Mark Bramhall offers a professional performance peppered with every trick of the actor's trade to make it a resonating effort. He approaches the work with such energy that the story seems like a new entity, freshly relevant and timely. Listeners will lose themselves in the journey of junkie William Lee as he makes his way from bizarre destination to even more bizarre destination in this unforgettable novel. A Grove paperback. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press; Fiftieth Edition, Anniversary Edition edition (November 1, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802119263
• ISBN-13: 978-0802119261
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (272 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #287,050 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

94 of 97 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Breakthrough in Tangiers, April 12, 2001

By 

Richard Behrens (Lambertville, NJ) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Naked Lunch (Paperback)

There has been much written about Naked Lunch, so much that the basic facts can be stated from memory: written in Tangiers while the author was addicted to heroin, edited by Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, sold to Olympia Press in Paris and Grove Press in New York, made the author famous and ranked him with Henry Miller and the Marquis de Sade, suffered obscenity trials that ended literary censorship in America, filmed as a movie by David Cronenberg almost twenty five years after publication. And don't forget that Steely Dan got their name from this novel but they claim they never read it.

That is the story of its life: few people have actually gotten through the whole book. It reads in fragments with inconsistent characters morphing, changing and altering identities. Dream, hallucination, reality and drug visions blend and merge and disperse. Scatalogical routines take coherant form and read like vaudville humor from a bathroom wall, then deteriorate into filthy fragments and irreverant and often disgusting descriptions of sado-masochistic sex acts. Everyone is a junkie, everyone is gay, everyone screws teenaged North African boys, everyone is insane, psychotic or diseased. Doctors kill their patients, police murder their suspects, drug addicts infect their marks with insect diseases and turn into centipedes during sex acts that threaten to nauseate the reader.

So what does it all mean? What is the motivation or the reasoning behind it all. Burroughs was no fool and he had a strong moral intent all the way. He considered himself a reporter who has entered behind enemy lines, like a photojournalist who returns from Vietnam with pictures of napalmed babies. The title Naked Lunch evokes an image of someone being wised up to what they are eating. Burroughs is depicting the relationship between the junkie and the drug dealer to be a metaphor for all control systems, for all vampiric systems whether it be capital punishment, abuse of political power, police states, etc. By the time Burroughs wrote this novel he had suffered through decades of abuse at the hands of federal agents, narcotics police and the customs officials of all the third world borderlines that he crossed as he moved from New York to Texas to New Orleans to New Mexico to Mexico City to Tangiers, all the time running from the police, none the least of reasons being that he shot his wife through the head during a drunken game of William Tell (she put a glass on her head and challenged him to shoot it off -- he lost the challenge).

Burroughs was a troubled junkie from a distinguished southern family, a Harvard student who studied archeology and linguistics, who studied medicine in Vienna, who went to New York to find work and wound up hooked on heroin. He took part in the birth of the Beat Generation in 1944 before setting off on his long tortured odyssey that led to more drug addiction, the death of his wife, and the bottom that he hit in Tangiers. He went there in the mid-50's to impress the exiled community of writers including Paul Bowels (who wrote the Shelting Sky) but who rejected him because he was just a filthy junky with a gun fetish. Instead he wrote Naked Lunch. It is a descent into Hell chronicled by a man who was to become one of the best writers of the 20th Century.

The events that led to the writing of Naked Lunch is chroniciled in the amazing documents known as the Letters of William Burroughs 1945-1959. These letters were the source of Cronenberg's screenplay of Naked Lunch, more so than Naked Lunch itself. Read the letters first, then read Naked Lunch. Then see the movie. In that order. It will all make sense...in the end.

A book that changed our cultural landscape. It never became dated. It exists outside of time and space, in the Interzone of our polluted minds.

148 of 167 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A trip to the dark side, August 17, 2002

By 

Roule Duke (the Green Inferno) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Naked Lunch (Paperback)

I have had my copy of Naked Lunch for years and years, read through it many times, but have never attempted to write any kind of review on it, up untill now, because it is just such an amazing book that no words could ever do it any justice! Right from the beginning the writing is brilliant and creative and the pacing is absolutely furious.

There is no simple way to convey the 'story' because indeed nothing like a linear plot line exists. Many people, my own brother included, hate this and simply will not read the whole way through it for this reason alone. The only way to attempt to summerise the book as a whole in a tidy fasion is to say that essintialy it chronicles a mans journey from the United States, the heat was closing in, to Mexico and later Tangiers and finally to the imaginary Interzone.

Along the way we meet many colorful charaters, the most memorable of which is the charming and diabolical Dr Benway, and visit many exotic dreamscapes like the Meet Cafe where patrons eat the black meat of the giant aquatic centerpede while mugwamps dispense addictive fluid from their heads. At first glace the reader may assume that this dark world with its evil political factions and infernal beaurocracies is a paranoid nightmare of the author, but when you look closer it is the dark side of same world that we live in everyday rendered down to its most extreme and 'naked' form.

While many would like to put William S Burroughs down as nothing more than a junkie who killed his own wife and whose writing is very overated, there is simply such power in his words that cannot be denied. The captivating writing style and the amazingly hilairious black humor that abounds throught out the book (and is probually some of the darkest humor ever, in any medium) come straight off every page. Likewise many people, insecure people I would assume, look down on this book for it's sections that are some what pornographic, not that they that far from your average 'rommance' novel, but because they consist of homosexual activities. Obviuosly Burroughs's unblinking brutal disection of our darkest desires and addictions, whether it be drugs, sex, money or power over the mind of others was too much for the general public to handle when it was first published and it is a shame to see that even in this day and age there are still some who express those same small minded attitudes when they are confronted by the intensity of this writing.

The best way I can think to express my opinion of Naked Lunch is to say that I feel it lives up to it's strange title completely, indeed contained within is the most 'naked' view, the most powerfull, raw, twisted and decidedly dark take on reality ever told. And when you read this book it's is as though you have sat down to 'lunch', the book is such a feast for the mind, evey page full of energy, heavy idea's and thick with creative genius.

Not a book for everyone, but those open minded will find reading this book to be a genuinly enriching experience, indeed there is no other book quite like it, but squares should stay away.

36 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Counterculture Literary Classic: Essential Burroughs, March 10, 2000

By 

"jdubach" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Naked Lunch (Paperback)

What else can I say, other than that this is "the" book that has brought William S. Burroughs the most fame(infamy?) and glory. Most people interested in Beat Literature choose Kerouac for insight, but I feel that Burroughs gets to the root of the Beatniks' most defining element: Drug use/abuse. His style is unrelenting. His prose harsh and ragged, not unlike himslef for some 15 odd years of his life in which he lived as a junky. I urge the reader to not read this book in sequence from beginning to end as a traditional novel. Instead, read a chapter or two at a time. Then, set it down and leave it alone for a day. The next day, return and continue reading. Each pargraph; each page is a message unto itself. Burroughs uses a rehab center in a place called Interzone, the character William Lee, and a sadistic orgy to help convey the over-all idea that the junky is a sad and tragic individual. But, what makes the junky so tragic is not his position in life. It is the sad fact that he put himself there in the first place. And, to spite himself, the junky's body must continue this act even though his mind says no. It is sad that this book has not been given the credit that it is due. Only at the end of his life did Mr. Burroughs begin to reap the rewards of his, and his comrades' work. As though he couldn't stand another minute in the world of the straight and narrow without a friend(Allen Ginsberg, the last Beat), he died after a life of extreme hardships and bittersweet success. Needless to say, this book sums up Burroughs' early life on the streets before any real intimations of success. It is not for the faint of heart, nor is it for those of you who prefer "popular" literature. It is for those of us who seek the truth, and read books about certain topics for an element of reality.