Word Virus: The William Burroughs Reader

(Paperback)

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An indispensable selection of Burroughs work.
Word Virus brings together selections of Burroughs most important and challenging work, beginning with his very early work (including a chapter from a novel in collaboration with Jack Kerouac) and following his trajectory through The Cat Inside.

This book has been edited to serve as a tool for the scholar and with commentary for the general reader. Important biographical information is included which provides key links to understanding Burroughs work within the context of his life.

Burroughs managed to be a visionary amongst writers: he imagined the Internet decades before its appearance and peered into the future of other technologies; he kept pace with world affairs and cultural trends; and, with each of his books, he introduced new possibilities to the form. When he died in 1997, the world of letters lost its most elegant insider.

Reviews

Praise for William Burroughs:

'Burroughs is the greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift.' Jack Kerouac

'Burroughs' voice is hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American, a voice in which one hears transistor radios and old movies and all the clichs and all the cons and all the newspapers, all the peculiar optimism, all the failure.' Joan Didion

'The only American novelist who may conceivably be possessed by genius.' Norman Mailer

'In the English language, William Burroughs is the greatest writer alive. His imagination has tackled head-on the post-war world, with its huge bureaucracies and sinister complexes. He has a paranoid vision, but as he himself said: the psychotic is someone who knows what's really going on.' J. G. Ballard, Sunday Times

William Burroughs broadened peoples conception of what makes humanity. In that way, he really was an American hero, a hero writer, and also just a great man. Lou Reed

Author Bio

William Burroughs was born in St Louis, Missouri in 1914. Immensely influential among the Beat writers of the 1950s notably Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg he already had an underground reputation before the appearance of his first important book, Naked Lunch. William Burroughs died in 1997.