Synopsis
NAKED LUNCH, the controversial masterpiece by Beat Generation founding father William S. Burroughs, has the distinction of being the last novel banned in the United States. Decried as obscene, the novel uses frank and extremely graphic depictions of drug use and sex as metaphors for the human condition: all of humanity, Burroughs feels, is victimized by some form of addiction. The fractured timeline follows Bill Lee (a name Burroughs occasionally used as a pseudonym) from New York to Tangiers and then into an alternate reality called the Interzone. Based on his own experiences as an addict and incorporating the hallucinatory disjointedness of habitual use and withdrawal, Burroughs's stream-of-consciousness narrative portrays the stages of an addiction to opiates. The novel's structure and timeline disintegrate as Lee's drug habit spins further and further out of control. With stylistic elements borrowed from popular culture (including detective stories, science fiction, and pornography), the work is at once blackly comic and suffused with Burroughs's famously paranoid view of the world.
| Details | | Publication Date: | 2004-02-01 | | Editor: | Barry Miles, James Grauerholz | | Edition Description: | Reprint |
| Size | | Length: | 304 pages | | Height: | 8.0 in | | Width: | 5.3 in | | Thickness: | 0.8 in | | Weight: | 12.8 oz |
Publisher's Note
Bill Lee, an addict and hustler, travels to Mexico and then Tangier in order to find easy access to drugs, and ends up in the Interzone, a bizarre fantasy world, in a commemorative edition that features restored text, archival material, Burroughs's own later introduction to the book, and his essay on psychoactive drugs. Reprint.
Industry Reviews
"Here is an American novelist writing in an existentialist idiom that proclaims the essential absurdity of life and reduces to to a flash series of cruel and often pointless charades. Time and place and plot and characters are all missing; yet none of this matters, by all the standards invoked. What matters, as in all abstract art, are the effects created, and Burroughs' effects are stunning. He is a writer of rare power....This paean to nihilism strikes me as more than the caterwaulings of a long-time addict, writing about addicts, for addicts and the beatnik fringe, which has embraced Burroughs as a genius."
New York Herald Tribune Book Review - Richard Kluger (11/25/1962)
"At the International Writers' Conference in Edinburgh...I said that in thinking over the novels of the last few years, I was struck by the fact that the only ones that had not simply given me pleasure but interested me had been those of Burroughs and Nabokov....I am quoted as saying that NAKED LUNCH is the most important novel of the age, of the epoch, of the century....The result, of course, is a disparagement of Burroughs, because if NAKED LUNCH is proclaimed as the masterpiece of the century, then it is easily found wanting....The phenomenon of repetition, gives rise to boredom; many readers complain that they cannot get through NAKED LUNCH. And/or that they find it disgusting. It IS disgusting and sometimes tiresome, often in the same places....Like Swift, Burroughs has irritable nerves and something of the crafty temperament of the inventor....Yet what saves NAKED LUNCH is not a literary ancestor but humour. Burroughs' humour is peculiarly American, at once broad and sly."
Encounter - Mary McCarthy (04/01/1963)
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