The Burroughs File

Trenchant writings by that sardonic "hombre invisible," William Seward Burroughs, perpetrator of Naked Lunch and other shockers. These malefic and beatific, mordant and hilarious straight-face reports on life are mostly from scatter-shot publications in obscure places, foreign and domestic. Including complete texts from White Subway, Cobblestone Gardens, and The Retreat Diaries, this collection delineates Burroughs‘ comprehensive world-view and his "insurrectionary sense of America‘s underside;” as Tom Carson epitomized it in The Village Voice. Also included are essays on Burroughs by Alan Ansen and Paul Bowles, and facsimile pages from the famous cut-up scrapbooks of the mid-century: The Book of Hours, John Brady‘s Book, and The Old Farmer‘s Almanac. " … his Swiftian vision of a processed, prepackaged life, of a kind of electrochemical totalitarianism, often evokes the black laughter of hilarious horror."—Playboy "Burroughs may be our only writer whose socio-political apacalyptica transcend both paranoia and triviality; his imagination is superb, his ear savagely satiric."—Kirkus Reviews "Burroughs is the greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift."—Jack Kerouac William Burroughs (1915-1997) is widely recognized as one of the most innovative writers of the twentieth century. His books include: Junky, Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, and Cities of the Red Night.