The anarchic, phenomenally strong-selling classic from the
godfather of the Beats, featuring for the first time the restored
text, all the accompanying essays, and newly discovered material
from the original manuscript. Revitalised with a cool new jacket
and an anecdote packed P.S. section. 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 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 after 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 Burrough's private correspondence.
'Not a novel but a booty brought back from nightmare, a coldly implacable look at the dark side of our nature.' New York Times 'A roller-coaster ride through hell, a safari to the strangest people of the strangest planet - ourselves...sit back and gorge yourself on this feast of a novel.' J. G. Ballard 'A delirious exploration of sexual violence through the art of collage.' Time Out '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 Praise for William Burroughs: 'Burroughs is the greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift.' Jack Kerouac 'Burroughs' voice is hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American, a voice in which one hears transistor radios and old movies and all the cliches and all the cons and all the newspapers, all the peculiar optimism, all the failure.' Joan Didion 'The only American novelist who may conceivably be possessed by genius.' Norman Mailer 'In the English language, William Burroughs is the greatest writer alive. His imagination has tackled head-on the post-war world, with its huge bureaucracies and sinister complexes. He has a paranoid vision, but as he himself said: the psychotic is someone who knows what's really going on.' J. G. Ballard, Sunday Times '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
William S. Burroughs (1914-97) studierte englische Literatur, Ethnologie, Archäologie und Medizin in Harvard und Wien. Arbeitete in den USA zeitweise als Privatdetektiv, Kammerjäger, Farmer und Reporter, und verfiel dem Rauschgift. Reisen nach Europa und Südamerika, lange Aufenthalte in Tanger. 1974 zieht er nach New York, 1982 nach Lawrence, Kansas. Für sein Gesamtwerk wurde Burroughs 1975 mit dem 'Literature Award des National Institute of Arts and Letters' geehrt.
