Burroughs takes the essence of Naked Lunch, and this time divivdes it into somewhat a short-story form. The way Burroughs mashes a million different idea into one sentence really makes you feel like you are in the mind of a junkie.

I think if you want to start out reading Burroughs, the best place to start out is here. In my opinion, Burroughs wrote better short stories than novels. Recommendations are Sapre A** Annie (that's only the please the censors), Twilight's Last Gleamings, A Junky's Christmas and Word. Overall an excellent documentation of the twisted mind of one of the most celebreated authors of the last century.

A novel of dangerous ideas, Interzone is literature at its subversive best. Like with all Burroughs' fictions, you'll never think about things the same after this.

This book has wonderful photos of every type of weather from clouds, sun dogs, rainbows, hail, freezing rain, and on and on. Each description is only a page long and includes a photograph. It's easy to understand and doesn't get into too much detail. My 6 year old, although she didn't understand the text, got this book out of the library and liked it so much she wanted a copy of her own -- she loved looking at the different photos. And as an adult, I had to agree with her, it's great just to thumb through as well as read the specifics.

It has been said "people complain about the weather but never do anything about it." Perhaps that's because they don't know much about it. This book will help you learn more about our weather. I was looking for a book that explained about various weather phenomenon and came across it. I loved it not only because of the pictures and descriptions in the last chapter on various weather types (different kinds of fogs, clouds, storms, precipitation, optical effects, etc), but also for lost of other information covered in the book, but also because the book's other chapters also contained so much excellent information. Subjects like Understanding the Weather (which covers the atmosphere, sources of weather, global wind patterns and different kinds of winds, frontal systems, etc.), Forecasting the Weather (obviously that has never been an exact science!), Changing the Weather, and also a secion on different climates and how humankind and animals adapt.

There are lots of pictures and diagrams in this book which help to explain key weather concepts. One day I will force myself to read this book cover to cover instead of getting sidetracked at all the gorgeous illustrations and pictures in this book, every time I pick it up to read it.

I love this book all about weather, how it occurs, what makes our planet hum. It has helped me read the sky far more clearly & understand daily forecasts. It is filled with gorgeous photographs & easily interpreted diagrams. I never knew there were so many forms of fog!

The one book by William S. Burroughs you should buy. The unique genius that William truly was-yes, indulgent, odd and unsettling at 80, but how great it would have been to have known him young and probably pretty in 1950-is best understood with the direction of J. Grauerholz, although a bourgeois beatnik, for sure, who did love him and is the world expert on him. Ira Silverberg is a true young publishing genius, the new Ferlinghetti, and most responsible for the book. My earlier review I withdraw. Although true, it did not reflect the genius and truth of William-and Jack, Allen, Anne, Philip, Lawrence, Gregory, Gary, even Neal and Huncke, et al. View their literature with a full and clear understanding of their weaknesses and that we, the readers, are almost certain to have less ability to 'drive-on' pass the drugs, sex, parties, confusion-to produce as they could or can. At least be warned. A lot of souls have been lost on the beat road.

Every book that anyone owns will, upon reflection, remind them of the period of their life in which they read the book. Sort of like music.

If I look at my bookcase, I can run my eyes over the spines of a hundred or so spines, and by extension, a hundred or so feelings given to me from those books.

'Word Virus' is by no means an exception to this rule. If anything, it proves it. Simply due to its extensiveness, and the complexity (or stupidity depending on how you look at it) of Burroughs' writing, it took me a few months to hack through in my final year of high school. Even now, the glaring red spine amongst my other books manages to evoke my feelings of that time even now.

But by god it's worth it. There is nothing more frightening than Burroughs' prose. Everything he writes cannot be understood intellectually, but rather emotionally. You read his words, trying to make head or tail of what is printed in front of you, but that's not the point. You just have to let his ideas, his experiments simply wash over you and you'll understand them in due course.

A true shining light in literature.

Belive the myth.

A very exspansive and definitive collection for the Burroughs enthusist. This does not have it all, but it does offer a generous portion of this man's work. Including the forementioned, in the other reviews, colaboration with Jack Kerouac. Grauerholz really put togther this labor of love. I'd recomend it for first timers as well as old time collectors. Inbetween each chapter biographical information pertinent to that era is included. Also features a cd spoken word sampler, that pulls material from the Giornio boxed set. I'd also recomend that hefty delight.

These last words of Burroughs will have great poignancy for his fans, but might not be all that meaningful to the casual reader. He writes about mundane everyday occurrences, memories of his eventful life, makes extensive literary references and provides loving descriptions of his cats. For me, the Burroughs magic is here in abundance and this book helps to complete the big picture of his life and work. It's not all smooth sailing, though, as his repetitive railings against the "war on drugs" can become a bit tedious. Obscure references are explained in the explanatory Notes: I was interested to see he was a member of IOT (International Order of Thanateros - see the books Liber Kaos and Liber Null & Psychonaut by Peter Carroll) and friends with V. Vale (See Re/Search Publications like Industrial Culture Handbook and Incredibly Strange Music). Some sections are funny, some are sad (especially where he writes about Joan Vollmer and his family) and some very interesting from a literary perspective. There are powerful passages of great beauty that stick in the mind. His love for his cats and for other animals like lemurs is very moving and shows that he may have been larger than life, but in the end he was very human. So, to wrap it up: Last Words is essential reading for the Burroughs enthusiast and the Burroughs scholar, to finally understand the man and his writing. Phew ... I am relieved, to know how much he loved some people and his pets, in the end.

It will be good in the future to see the orginal notes--one really wonders what has been edited out to protect the image. Any journal is a problem to read--but when the editing is done by those with the most to protect (family, lovers, etc), historians must be really concerned. Probably not worth buying new, but it will be out in paper soon. Get the cheap copy.

Touching, amusing entries in the life of an intellectual pioneer.

Burroughs revealed so much in his fiction but the journals are a more probing way we can peer into his mind and see what he was thinking in the last days.

One often wonders where good psychedelicists are headed in their final corporeal days, so works like this provide a certain insight not gleaned from their main body of work.

Burroughs was quite a character.

This novel is unlike anything that I've ever read. Burroughs's flights of fancy are wildly imaginative and often repugnant; he displays an unusual mastery of language and an outrageous prose. With its highly volatile and pornographic content, sometimes homosexual in nature, it's somewhat hard to believe that "Naked Lunch" was printed in 1959. (In fact, censorship proceedings are documented in the introduction to the paperback version. For this episode alone, the book is important.)

Whether you like this fiction is a serious matter of taste, but it IS vilely artistic and undeniably useful to the student of literature. What's ultimately the point of the novel? I can only offer a subjective opinion. But we are fed the notion that the novel condemns all forms of addiction -- addiction to drugs, power, subservience, sex, etc. -- though it's difficult to see this without prior guidance. I thought that I'd seen and heard everything, but my first encounter with Burroughs proved me wrong -- big time!

This kind of writing isn't for the faint of heart. Although Burroughs definitely displays a prodigious talent, his art may be compared to Henry Miller on drugs. If you feel that you COULD'VE liked this book, but the style threw you off, give Miller's "Tropic of Cancer" a whirl.

There has been much written about Naked Lunch, so much that the basic facts can be stated from memory: written in Tangiers while the author was addicted to heroin, edited by Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, sold to Olympia Press in Paris and Grove Press in New York, made the author famous and ranked him with Henry Miller and the Marquis de Sade, suffered obscenity trials that ended literary censorship in America, filmed as a movie by David Cronenberg almost twenty five years after publication. And don't forget that Steely Dan got their name from this novel but they claim they never read it.

That is the story of its life: few people have actually gotten through the whole book. It reads in fragments with inconsistent characters morphing, changing and altering identities. Dream, hallucination, reality and drug visions blend and merge and disperse. Scatalogical routines take coherant form and read like vaudville humor from a bathroom wall, then deteriorate into filthy fragments and irreverant and often disgusting descriptions of sado-masochistic sex acts. Everyone is a junkie, everyone is gay, everyone screws teenaged North African boys, everyone is insane, psychotic or diseased. Doctors kill their patients, police murder their suspects, drug addicts infect their marks with insect diseases and turn into centipedes during sex acts that threaten to nauseate the reader.

So what does it all mean? What is the motivation or the reasoning behind it all. Burroughs was no fool and he had a strong moral intent all the way. He considered himself a reporter who has entered behind enemy lines, like a photojournalist who returns from Vietnam with pictures of napalmed babies. The title Naked Lunch evokes an image of someone being wised up to what they are eating. Burroughs is depicting the relationship between the junkie and the drug dealer to be a metaphor for all control systems, for all vampiric systems whether it be capital punishment, abuse of political power, police states, etc. By the time Burroughs wrote this novel he had suffered through decades of abuse at the hands of federal agents, narcotics police and the customs officials of all the third world borderlines that he crossed as he moved from New York to Texas to New Orleans to New Mexico to Mexico City to Tangiers, all the time running from the police, none the least of reasons being that he shot his wife through the head during a drunken game of William Tell (she put a glass on her head and challenged him to shoot it off -- he lost the challenge).

Burroughs was a troubled junkie from a distinguished southern family, a Harvard student who studied archeology and linguistics, who studied medicine in Vienna, who went to New York to find work and wound up hooked on heroin. He took part in the birth of the Beat Generation in 1944 before setting off on his long tortured odyssey that led to more drug addiction, the death of his wife, and the bottom that he hit in Tangiers. He went there in the mid-50's to impress the exiled community of writers including Paul Bowels (who wrote the Shelting Sky) but who rejected him because he was just a filthy junky with a gun fetish. Instead he wrote Naked Lunch. It is a descent into Hell chronicled by a man who was to become one of the best writers of the 20th Century.

The events that led to the writing of Naked Lunch is chroniciled in the amazing documents known as the Letters of William Burroughs 1945-1959. These letters were the source of Cronenberg's screenplay of Naked Lunch, more so than Naked Lunch itself. Read the letters first, then read Naked Lunch. Then see the movie. In that order. It will all make sense...in the end.

A book that changed our cultural landscape. It never became dated. It exists outside of time and space, in the Interzone of our polluted minds.

Naked Lunch is, to say the least, not for everyone. One of the main addictions featured in it is of course addiction to heroin, but the novel is about so much more than that. It's about addiction of any kind whether it's to drugs, money, power, or sex. Here we are introduced to Dr. Benway (a behavioral conditioning freak), a man who teaches his rectum how to talk, and to a group of people to hang themselves to feel that final orgasm which is rumored to be more powerful than any others you could ever have. In this book Burroughs also takes a swipe at the media and the written word (or "word-virus") in general, trying to destroy the importance of the narrative. Burroughs believed the media used language to control the way we think; I read somewhere that he called Time and Life magazine "some kind of police force for the mind." Some call this paranoia, others call it genius. I suggest you read this book and decide for yourselves.

Comes across a bit like watered down Burroughs, but this writing is interesting because it's so stripped down--acoustic Burroughs--lacking the electrical force of the explosion of images, and rape and plundering of words which typifies Burroughs--but while retaining Burroughs' subject matter.

This first piece in this book however is the exception--"Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 28, 1986"--lays out Burroughs' position on America rather sweetly.