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Binding: PaperbackDewey Decimal Number: 813 EAN: 9780802140180 ISBN: 0802140181 Label: Grove Press Manufacturer: Grove Press Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 304 Publication Date: January 26, 2004 Publisher: Grove Press Studio: Grove Press Related Items:
Browse for similar items by category: Click to Display Editorial Review: Amazon.com 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. Product Description: Naked Lunch is one of the most important novels of the twentieth 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. Reedited by Burroughs scholar Barry Miles and Burroughs's longtime editor James Grauerholz, Naked Lunch: The Restored Text includes many editorial corrections to errors present in previous editions, and incorporates Burroughs's notes on the text, several essays he wrote over the years about the book, and an appendix of 20 percent all-new material and alternate drafts from the original manuscript, which predates the first published version. For the Burroughs enthusiast and the neophyte, this volume is a valuable and fresh experience of this classic of our culture. 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 & EvilBurroughs' 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: - BrilliantReading 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 
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