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Gay Fiction
Condition: Good Jacket: stained, worn at edges, ink mark on inner flap. Cover: slight curling of spine edges, top corners and edges lightly damaged and stained, indentation of bottom edge.Book: flyleaf has ink inscription and staple indentation and light marks. Page edges lightly marked. Pages beginning to discolour with age. Good surviving example of this important edition. Plot / Content: "The Naked Lunch is one of the most important and at the same time one of the most controversial novels to have appeared since the war and is considered by many distinguished literary figures as the major American novel of our time. Burroughs is at the same time the central figures in the 'beat' movement and the principal American post-Joycean, using and creating language in a new way to explore the very extremes of consciousness and of dream reality. The form of the book is episodic and discontinuous, the language is taken from the underground argot of the drug addict or 'junky', the effect a bewildering international journey through twentieth century mythology. Burroughs has used his own experiences as a former durg addict, and the extraordinary residue of unusual knowledge that these experiences left with him, to write a satirical masterpiece that cuts like a scalpel under the surface skin of reality to the festering sores that plague modern man underneath. Burroughs is probably the greatest satirist since Dean Swift and some of the more startling pages in the book are conceived as a tract against such modern obscenities as capital punishment in the manner of A Modest Proposal. The publishers believe that this book is one of the great contemporary masterpieces of creative fiction and worthy to stand beside the work of Joyce, Kafka, Eliot and Beckett, with all of whom Burroughs has much in common." (from the jacket) The book was filmed in 1991, directed by David Cronenberg, starring Peter Weller, Judy Davis and Ian Holm. Background / Biography: William Seward Burroughs II (5 February 1914 – 2 August 1997) was an American novelist, essayist, social critic, painter and spoken word performer. Much of Burroughs's work is semi-autobiographical, drawn from his experiences as an opiate addict, a condition that marked the last fifty years of his life. A primary member of the Beat Generation, he was an avant-garde author who affected popular culture as well as literature. continued on Wikipedia Reviews: "The Naked Lunch is a book of beauty, great difficulty and maniacally exquisite insight. I think that William Burroughs is the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius." Norman Mailer "As in any important piece of literature (and The Naked Lunch is very important) one ends by admiring the art which is able to transmute such terrible subject-matter into the pretext for a kind of joy . . . The making of this particular work of art was part of an ineluctable vocation. It demands to be read." Anthony Burgess (from the jacket) Clicking on advertiser links on this site may allow these companies to gather and use information about your visit to this and other websites to provide you with advertisements about goods and services presumed to be of interest to you. |
Quote from this book "I can feel the heat closing in, feel them out there making their moves, setting up their devil doll stool pigeons, crooning over my spoon and dropper I throw away at Washington Square Station, vault a turnstile and two flights down the iron stairs, catch an uptown A train . . . Young, good looking, crew cut, Ivy League, advertising exec type fruit holds the door back for me. I am evidently his idea of a character. You know the type comes on with bartenders and cab drivers, talking about right hooks and the Dodgers, call the counterman in Nedick's by his first name. A real asshole. And right on time this narcotics dick in a white trench coat (imagine tailing somebody in a white trench coat - trying to pass as a fag, I guess) hit the platform. I can hear the way he would say it, holding my outfit in his left hand, right hand on his piece: 'I think you dropped something, fella.' But the subway is moving. 'So long flatfoot!' I yell, giving the fruit his B production. I look into the fruit's eyes, take in the white teeth, the Florida tan, the two hundred dollar sharkskin suit, the button-down Brooks Brothers shirt and carrying The News as a prop." opening paragraphs Secondhand booksellers |
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