eShop USA > Books > Naked Lunch
Naked Lunch
Binding: Paperback
EAN: 9780394171081
ISBN: 039417108X
Label: Grove Press
Manufacturer: Grove Press
Number Of Items: 1
Publication Date: 1969-05
Publisher: Grove Press
Studio: Grove Press
Related Items: Featured Listmania!
Editorial 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.
Since its original publication in Paris in 1959, Naked Lunch has become one of the most important novels of the 20th century. Exerting its 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, it is one of the books that redefined not just literature but American culture. Now, nearly forty years after the book's first U.S. appearance, Burroughs scholar Barry Miles and Burroughs's longtime editor James Grauerholz have given us an edition of the book which includes many editorial corrections to errors present in the existing text, and incorporates Burroughs's notes on the text, several essays he wrote over the years about the book, and, most excitingly, an appendix of twenty percent new material and alternate drafts from the original manuscript, which predates the edition eventually was published by Olympia Press in Paris. For the Burroughs enthusiast and the neophyte, this volume is a valuable and fresh experience of perhaps his most enduring artistic legacy.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - huh?
this has nothing to do with lunch or nakedness.
i'm very dissapointed. is there no literature on folks who like to eat their lunch in the nude?
Rating:  - NOT LITERATURE!!!! (ZERO STARS!!!!!)
This is not literature so much as a LIBERAL ATHEIST'S heroin laced premonition in the 1950's of all books having (sadly) been approved by the authorities here in the present, and my opinion of the author's own serious problems is way beyond me. And it is just like some JESUS HATING BABY KILLING SCUM like a "BEAT" or a "HIPPY" or a "PUNK ROCKER" or people reading this book and giving it to their children to read and read again which is like some kind of cult, reading literature, and trying not ... Read More
Rating: - Beyond Good & Evil
Burroughs' work is a reaction to post -1945 cold war America in its radical deployment of tone, style and content. It endured bans, censorship and obscenity trials before hitting bookstores in the early nineteen sixties. But for all that, its continuing power is as spiritual work that makes it more than merely a insightful document of its times.
"Naked Lunch" is no "Ulysses" and yet it shares a kinship with that masterwork. Not so much the use of stream of consciousness but in other ... Read More
Rating: - "The man is never on time."
I picked up a copy of NAKED LUNCH at a local bookstore, because I'd recently rented the movie, which left me confused. I thought, well, the book probably sucks, but I'll try anything once. So I went home and thumbed through it, until I finally read the whole book in one sitting overnight.
This book is FASCINATING.
It's a study of addiction, insanity and sex. Without giving anything away, I can tell you that it's very different than the David Cronenberg movie, yet at the same ... Read More
Rating: - Brilliant
Reading William S. Burroughs' drug-induced, hallucinatory nightmare that is Naked Lunch was, is, and always will be, a hard book to read. There is no real narrative of any sort to be found in a majority of Naked Lunch, as one reads of the graphic, frequently disgusting world of Interzone and its inhabitants. What has always made Naked Lunch so remarkable is Burroughs' startling imagery that is as fragmented as a drug addict's thoughts, as Burroughs pulls no punches in these pages. If you have never ... Read More
Related Categories:
| |
 |
