Junky The Definitive Text of Junk

"Reads today as fresh and unvarnished as it ever has."-Will Self on "Junky" "Of all the Beat Generation writers, William S. Burroughs was the most dangerous. . . . He was anarchy's double agent, an implacable enemy of conformity and of all agencies of control-from government to opiates."--"Rolling Stone" "The most important writer to emerge since World War II. . . . For his sheer visionary power, and for his humor, I admire Burroughs more than any living writer, and most of those who are dead."--J.G. Ballard "William was a Shootist. He shot like he wrote--with extreme precision and no fear."--Hunter S. Thompson "A book of great beauty . . . . Burroughs is the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius." --Norman Mailer "Ever since "Naked Lunch" . . . Burroughs has been ordained America's most incendiary artist."--"Los Angeles Times" "Burroughs voice is hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American."--Joan Didion "In 1953, at the height of American conformism and anti-communist hysteria, William S. Burroughs published "Junky," an irresistible strung-out ode to the joys and perversities of drug addiction. . . . "Junky" eschews allegory for scrupulous realism. . . . More than anything else, "Junky" reads like a field guide to the American underworld."--"The Daily Beast" "Retro-cool, like something Don Draper might find in the Greenwich Village pad of that reefer-smoking painter he was seeing in the first season of Mad Men."--"Las Vegas Weekly" on "Naked Lunch" "A creator of grim fairy tales for adults, Burroughs spoke to our nightmare fears and, still worse, to our nightmare longings. . . . And more than any other postwar wordsmith, he bridged generations; popularity in the youth culture is greater now than during the heady days of the Beats."--"The Los Angeles Times Book Review" "Burroughs seems to revel in a new medium . . . a medium