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For the respectable, right-thinking American society of the 1950s, the Beats were a group of antisocial youth—oddballs. And among them, William S. Burroughs was always the strangest of all. He came from a well-off family, dressed in a suit and tie, looked more like a bank clerk than a rebel, and even as a young man, he already seemed like an old gentleman. But this prim appearance was just a façade, because Burroughs was the most radical of the Beats, the one who stared deepest into the abyss. While others drank alcohol and smoked marijuana, he immersed himself in the underworld of heroin and experimented with hallucinogens—substances that would only become popular among hippies and psychedelic users in the decades to come.
This volume brings together the three essential novels of William S. Burroughs. Junkie, his first foray into the subject of addiction, is a visceral portrait of the heroin world. Naked Lunch continues on the theme but takes a radical leap forward, delving into the internal experience of addiction—a world between reality and nightmare, where subversion reigns, sex takes on the proportions of a devastating orgy, and literature becomes experimentation, hallucination, delirium. As the author himself said at the end of it: “Getting high is seeing things from a special angle.”
In Queer, drugs also appear—here in the almost epic search for ayahuasca—but the central theme is sex, and homosexuality becomes a liberating transgression.
“Burroughs is also a true poet. One page of his prose is as dense in imagery as anything by Saint-John Perse or Rimbaud.” —Allen Ginsberg
“Burroughs is the only contemporary American writer who may well be possessed by genius.” —Norman Mailer
“By describing addiction as ‘a way of life,’ Burroughs turns the hypodermic needle into a microscope, through which he examines the human soul under 20th-century capitalism.” —Will Self
