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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #12432 in Books
• Published on: 2004-01-26
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

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.

Review
A classic of modern literature for over 35 years, Naked Lunch is the unnerving tale of a narcotics addict's monumental descent into hell, as he travels from New York to Tangiers, and then into the Interzone. There he finds a nightmarish modern urban wasteland in which the forces of evil vie for control of the individual and all of humanity. This abridged recording is in the author's own voice. -- Midwest Book Review

Customer Reviews

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?

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 to be READING THE BIBLE AGAIN AND PUTTING THE BIBLE ASIDE FOR EVERY OTHER BOOK OF OUR OWN CULTURE'S SO-CALLED DEFICIENCES!!! It is absurd, or the FUTURE. WHO reads this and resonates with this such that it is "naked" truth, or the "Naked lunch" to them?!!! Only a LIBERAL, or a "UNITARIAN" or a "DEMOCRAT FEMINEST" (Rotting Goddess: The Origins of the Witch in Classical Antiquity)!!!! I mean, who are these people putting it in the schools' tap-water and in the public libraries for other people's children to try to DESTROY AMERICA? PEOPLE NEED TO STOP THINKING AND REALIZE THAT THE BIBLE IS ALL WE NEED NOT SOME HOMOSEXUALIST-ATHEIST TRASH!!!

I mean

This is not literature so much as an LIBERAL ATHEIST'S heroin laced interpretation of our culture's so-called deficiëncies. It is absurd that this book has been approved in by the authorities here in the present, or the future. WHO reads this and resonates with the opinion of the author's own serious problems is beyond me. And it is this that is "naked" truth, or the "Naked lunch"? Only to a LIBERAL JESUS HATING BABY EATING SCUM like a "BEAT" or a "HIPPY" or a "PUNK ROCKER" or a "LIBERAL" or a "UNITARIAN" (Blood on the Altar: The Secret History of the World's Most Dangerous Secret Society)!!!! I mean, who are these people reading this book and giving it to their children to read and putting it in the schools/public libraries for other people's children to read?!!! It is like some kind of cult which is reading literature, thus trying to DESTROY AMERICA. PEOPLE NEED TO START THINKING AND READING THE BIBLE AGAIN AND PUT ASIDE EVERY OTHER BOOK!!!! THE BIBLE IS ALL WE NEED NOT SOME HOMOSEXUALATHEIST TRASH!!!


I mean

This is not literature so much as a LIBERAL ATHEIST'S deficiëncies. It is absurd that this book has been approved. WHO reads this and resonates with the opinion of the author's that it is the "naked" truth, or the "Naked lunch"? Only to a LIBERAL "PUNK ROCKER" or a so-called "UNITARIAN" or a "LIBERAL"!!!! I mean, who are these people reading and putting it in the schools/public libraries for other people's children. They are people who are only interested in reading literature, thus trying to DESTROY AMERICA AGAIN WHILE PUTTING ASIDE EVERY OTHER BOOK LIKE THE BIBLE!!!! It is an ATHEIST'S heroin laced interpretation of our so-called culture's authorities here in the present. Our countries own future serious problems are beyond belife (Rotting Face: Smallpox and the American Indian). It is these LIBERAL JESUS HATING SCUM, KILLING AND EATING BABIES like some "BEATS" or "HIPPYS" who are reading this book and giving it to their children to read. It is like some kind of cult which is reading literature. PEOPLE NEED TO STOP THINKING AND START READING THE BIBLE AGAIN INSTEAD!! THE BIBLE IS ALL WE NEED NOT SOME HOMOSEXUALISTATHEIST TRASH!!!

And what is it with this so-called "CUT-UP" business? That is not allowed. That is not good writing. Ask any ENGLISH teacher (as opposed to any gobbeldy-gook teacher) and he will tell you that it is not legitimate. You cant do that!!! I cant write a paper and then tear it up into bits and then rearrange the bits and then tape them back together and then turn it in and then expect that the teacher will then accept it!!!

Beyond Good & Evil
Burroughs' 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 stylistic aspects; discontinuity of plot and ideas, in its unreliable narration and author's desire to shock the reader. But more than that, both works contain a transformative imagination.

In subject matter "Naked Lunch" is more extreme than "Ulysses". It repeatedly forces the viewer to see sexual acts, physical violence and self-destruction in a way that is more than shocking. It is about the act of seeing itself, about imagination itself not tied to character or story but to pure vision whether drug induced or not.

The style - anti-narrative and anti-story - Dadaism in American garb, deprives the reader of any fictive crutch that could ease and blur the power of what is written. Even though those mid-century social outcasts, the homosexual and the junky are no longer as outrageous as they were in 1959, how they are depicted, laying bare the human impulses of disgust and destruction, retains the power to shock because in the fifty years since, we've seen many, many drug abusers and homosexuals in literature and pop culture but none of those portrayals are more raw and cringe-worthy than what Burroughs shows us.

The insistence on the otherworldly vulgarity, on the repetition of debased acts has an incantatory, ritualistic quality that only starts to make sense when Burroughs' invokes the Sollubi, an untouchable caste known for their debased existence. He ponders that they might be a fallen priestly caste that take "on themselves all human vileness." The same could be said of "Naked Lunch".