This is neither man's best work and Burroughs was right to not want it to see the light of day. Both their voices are undeveloped, with Kerouac's voice being the better of the two. Rather than coming off as enchantingly youthful as some of Kerouac's early protagonist, Ryko comes of as dull. Rathe...
The characters in these Beat novels are all such criminals, it's so funny! The dialogue of Kerouac and Burroughs is entirely believable and I enjoyed the similarities and contrasts of today with 1940's New York. Kerouac does outwrite Burroughs, he has a bit more depth and Burroughs comes across a...
The Wild Boys by William S. Burroughs This book is sub titled "A Book Of the Dead" and is probably best not read by anyone who is at all homophobic as I'm sure they would be appalled at all the at times truly odd gay sex Burroughs manages to put in this wild vision of the future as it was when h...
Non c'è nessuna realtà vera o reale - La realtà è semplicemente uno schema di scansione più o meno costante.Ci siamo. E' fatta. La Nebulosa del Granchio stringe le sue chele attorno all'umanità posseduta e contaminata dal virus della parola e dalla droga. Il corpo, la macchina morbida, si trasfor...
Not knowing much about William Burroughs other than his history with drugs, I picked up ‘The Soft Machine’ spontaneously, assuming that it would be a “normal” novel, albeit a strange one. To say the least, I certainly wasn’t expecting this. One paragraph in, and I’d raised an eyebrow; one page in...
In The Place of Dead Roads, Burroughs takes a detour through the American Old West, beginning with the 1899 death of writer/gunslinger Kim Carsons in a Colorado shootout. From there the story unfolds in a nonlinear telling of Kim’s past experience -- across vast swaths of time and space, under va...
Cities of the Red Night follows a dual narrative, slipping fluidly between the early 18th century exploits of a libertarian pirate crew, led by gunsmith Noah Blake, and the late 20th century “private asshole” (Clem Snide) hired to find the decapitated remains of one Jerry Green -- victim apparent...
Impossible to rate or even classify this weird and disturbing book from the late '60s (it's not a novel, it's not a collection of mini-novels, it's not even a psychological treatise, though it has aspects of all three). It explores the links between death/danger and sexuality (his own wife had di...
The Western Lands wraps up the Red Night trilogy with a more involved look at the pilgrimage thereto, intercut with crosscurrents from the Egyptian Book of the Dead and remembrances from the author’s own life, the mass of which merges into a hallucinogenic exploration of the potentialities inhere...
It is tempting to say that Burroughs’s writing represents either the urgent dispatches from a social observer warning of impending danger or the ravings of a paranoid crank. However, as Burroughs himself points out, either/ or thinking is reductive, and so if one wants to get at the complexity o...
But if you're reading this then you probably expect a challenge anyway. What it means. Smell of rancid tide flat--police drama strangely flickers in and out, much channels are playing. picture. The unnerving documentary on parasitic Machine, however this strangely analogous to Doctor. Imagine tha...