William Burroughs Jnr. was born to the predicament that all those in the wake of a formidable family history are. That is, one in which one must, to forge one's own identity, risk especially large strides to step from long familial shadows. Burroughs Jnr.'s ancestors cast not only long shadows, but contorted ones too. His great grandfather founded the Burroughs Adding Machine Company, the double-edged sword of inheritance then laid at the feet of subsequent generations; at age four his father, iconic hophead and avant-garde litterateur William S. Burroughs, accidentally shot his mother in the head during a drunken presentation of William Tell. (She died. Burroughs Snr. was charged with criminal imprudence and subsequently decamped for South America and Tangiers, the latter being where he wrote NAKED LUNCH, a love-it-or-hate-it binge of surreal imagery that has since assumed mythic proportion in counterculture lore.) By age eighteen he was under the care of his paternal grandparents in West Palm Beach, Florida - and injecting methamphetamine daily. It is here that we rendezvous with the narrative of SPEED.

Superficially the book recounts the 1966 trip to New York made by Burroughs Jnr. and his needle buddy, Chad ("His whole attitude was full of fear and I could see that right off, and I always respect scared people who know what they're up against.") Chad comes off as one or two shy of the full compliment ("We turned a corner and he kept on going straight and didn't answer when I called to him.") though as a sidekick I think he would have been without peer. Appropriately he provides the book's comic highlight, a bout of grand paranoia during which he makes the protestation familiar to anyone acquainted with that state of being: "Every direction I started to go, he'd say, 'Oh, no! You're not getting me to go THAT way!'"

Accompanied only by their wits and an accommodating moral code ("I never rob anyone unless they die or go to jail which leaves me plenty of room, after all. I remember one time I boosted a guy that was only in a coma, and when he came to, the atmosphere was pretty strained for a while.") they accept hospitality where they can, occasionally with squares ("They wondered in stage whispers what was on my mind. I said, 'Carnivorous albino badgers, the size of a boxcar,' and they shut up.") but mostly with fellow chemical crusaders, amiable folk who wished the trivial and mundane would let them be so that they could get down to the real business of transcending reality ("I got on the phone to another session across town and tried to get them to come over. But they were all in the midst of God and didn't feel like driving.")

Considering what must have been a fairly skewed appreciation of reality, his sensibilities nevertheless appear attuned to some degree. At a gas station he lingers to savour the phonetics of "Gargoyle Arctic Oil", and later falls to the spell of a prodigal jazz musician ("But one morning I woke up just as it was getting possible to see and he was talking through his horn real quiet and conversational, and I think I never heard a more healing sound. I wish I knew his name so you could watch out for him."). Still, he's not above it all so much as to be immune from a spot of arbitrary rumination ("I sat still for a long time thinking about cathedrals.") or the inevitable rush of hyper-self-awareness ("'On the way over, I got to thinking about my ape man heritage for some unknown reason and I felt pretty hairy by the time we arrived.")

Substance abuse and the law being mostly antagonistic fields of interest, it's not long before the fuzz show up ("I was standing there on the curb dreaming revolution when a cop came over and said to break it up, fella. There was only one of me, but I broke it up anyway and went down the street in a well-rounded way.") Inevitably Burroughs Jnr. is soon in the wrong apartment at the wrong time. A stint or two at the county hotel follow. Against the narrative of the street these passages betray a mind grateful for respite and reflection ("Up and down the tier, the Puerto Ricans were banging out Latin rhythms on bedposts and bars and singing popular love songs...I felt sleep catching up to me as Gestalt shifted and spaces between the bars floated free...It was complex now, maybe thirty captives in separate cells listened hard and patterned together as my cellmate's tears and prayers fell unconsciously into time. Every bit of light went out, shapes ran melting through the dark as the rhythm slowed and stopped, and the last I heard was the click of the hack's heels as he passed on the catwalk and the kid finished, 'forgive me...'")

Mainlining a drug that narcoleptics use to stay awake doesn't bode well for the pursuit of slumber, and soon enough Burroughs Jnr. decides that for the sake of health, sanity, etc., a return to Florida is in order. At book's end, standing out front of the grandparent's house, he signs off in typically humble fashion ("Then I took a deep breath, smelling the jasmine, and I went inside.")

The prose is breezy, uncomplicated, a loose freeform arrangement that occupies the space a foot or two off the ground. Commas are applied sparingly, the effect being a pitter-patter rhythm that never slows for heavy discourse or pedantic application of fact. There's no danger of cutting yourself on any severe literary edgings here.

Highly recommended, but as the reader is often asked to meet the author half way, as it were, I'd hesitate to push this title upon anyone but those on amiable terms with the subject matter (though a passing interest may suffice).

William Burroughs Jnr. died in 1981, aged 35, of acute gastrointestinal hemorrhage associated with micronodular cirrhosis.

****stars

READ THIS FOR YER OWN GOOD...

_Speed_ was William S. Burrough's Jr.'s (not to be confused with his father, the "real" WSB) first novel. It's hard not to compare it to _The Basketball Diaries_ on the basis of some trivial and obvious similarities (_Speed_ is about the author's adolescent experiences as a methedrine addict in NYC) but he's going somewhere very different from where Carroll was going. His vision is colder and more distant than Carroll's, less sentimental. Yes, it IS possible to be less sentimental than Jim Carroll. WSB doesn't (didn't, i should say) write at all like his father; his prose is clean and spare, his characters are human, etc. Forget WSB sr. and Jim Carroll; WSB Jr. was enough of a writer to be considered on his own merits, which are significant. A very worthwhile book, as is its sucessor, _Kentucky Ham_. A third novel, _Pakriti Junction_, apparently was too fragmentary to print at the time of the author's death.

"Conversations With William S. Burroughs" might be more than most readers interested in the Beats might care to read. However, if you find the life of a writer as intriguing as his writings, you'll love this.

As a student of the Beat style (particularly how Kerouac merged poets into music), I was curious to learn more about the people of the movement.

"Conversations With William S. Burroughs" feeds into the pretensions of Burroughs' personality. There's the obvious cross-pollinating in here, showing how Corso, Ginsberg, Ferlingetti, Kerouac all fed each other compliments. Owning a lot of the pop-philosphy which eventually ruined the Beats... discussing issues he didn't care about in 'real life'. It is hard to tell what Burroughs finds interesting, and what he really believed in.

This isn't the best you'll read on Burroughs, but it is essential to get into the full look of the writer's pensive life. He seems more introspective than his counterparts, but just as politically-minded.

I recommend "Conversations With William S. Burroughs."

Anthony Trendl

Who can't love a book in which WB tells all?

John Giorno is one of the finest spoken word poets in New York City. He is also quite adept at getting the word down on paper, too. You Got to Burn to Shine is a great collection of poems. It even includes an introduction by William S Burroughs. Giorno writes poetry from the gut. It is free verse that swings with intensity. if you like a snifter of realism in your poetry then this book is for you. Giorno writes with a hard nosed frankness that is both poignant and refreshing without being overbearing. Poems like Stretching it Wider and (Last Night) I Gambled With My Anger and Lost are classic free verse. I read this collection with great delight.

I found this book to be powerful and truthful. The context and the langauge were delicate machines portaying the life of the author. It should not be read by anyone with a closed mind.

this, with ADDING MACHINE, gives you Burroughs's philosophy and outlook on life. the former is a series of interviews, more of conversations between Billy and his contemporaries. Laugh along with Terry Southern then boggle over the encounter with Beckett.

I picked this book up after reading a few other biograpies by Bockris, and, although I can say that I am bored by Burroughs the writer, I am facinated by Burroughs the man. Always interesting and funny, you don't have to be a fan of William Burroughs' writing to be intrigued by his personality and intelligence.

The usual cold-fish attitude so closely associated with Burroughs is bowled over by a brilliant, funny-funny man who, through some divine intervention is seemingly unaffected by his "habits". This book is far better than a biography written by some wanna-be author who ran out the day before the interview and bought Naked Lunch. Observe the happenings and processes Burroughs goes through during his creative process and revel in the true glory of Bill Burroughs

I found queer to be a dissapointment. I loved Junky, and it is one of my favorite books, but queer was a let down. It takes place after junky ends and we follow William Lee around with his fascination with Eugene Allerton and his trip to South America. But the story isn't that interesting. There is more of a plot here than there was in junky, but I found Lee's struggles with heroin much more fascinating than his obssession over the boring Allerton. queer is told from an outside narrator rather than from Lee's perspective, and as a result, the voice that helped make junky so great is missing. It just doesn't match with the standards Burroughs set when he wrote Junky. If you are a Beat scholar, then this is a book you should read (it is one of Burroughs important works) or if you study gay literature, then you should read this. If you're just looking for a good book, reread Junky...

A brilliant, bare book of an intense, one-way homosexual relationship, and the tale of unrequited love on any level. Burrough's describes the feeling of giving yourself and getting nothing in return beautifully. A must for the loved and lost masses. A good place to begin your Burroughs reading list as it's one of his most coherent books.

William's QUEER was a stunningly perfect piece of evidence supporting the statement that "Nothing a person can write has the capacity to be untrue." As I read the book during a five-day visit to Gettysburgh University, PA, I couldn't help but laugh at the subtle similarities between Lee's sorrow, his overbearing affection for Allerton, his vulnerability, and all those elements also exhibited in modern day 'traditional' lives. QUEER is an unignorable read for the Burroughs buff and everyone else.

The Atrocity Exhibition is a novel, or a series of short but connected stories, depending on how you decide to come at it. Traven/Travis/Tallis/etc. appears as one man, moving through different evolutionary experiments, physical and psychological. He is experimenting with his psyche, as Ballard experiments with storytelling and writing. Chapter headings like "The University of Death," "Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown" and "You and Me and the Continuum" give an idea towards the scope of the characters' inner and outer explorations. The experimental sexual interactions, recurring alternate deaths and celebrity obsessions are from lists produced by Ballard using free assocation. Glimpses of themes of many of his later works can be found in this text.

Special features of the Re/Search revised edition includes an introduction by William S. Burroughs, new notes and comments from Ballard, and four additional short stories. Notes and commentary from Ballard himself run in the margins alongside the text to which they are related. The collection of medical illustrations by Phoebe Gloeckner is impressive. Often overlooked are the excellent black and white urban images, photographed by Ana Barrado. Her pictures are purposefully "Ballardesque," showing abandoned parking lots, beaches and launch sites.

I was extremely excited to look up "Horror" here & find not some Koontz or Saul or Rice travesty recommended by readers, but ATROCITY EXHIBITON. A very difficult work. Some experimental, avant-garde stuff just irritates me, but the reason I kept at Ballard was because I believed him. I had to crack it open. Break it. Made me bleed a little. Your mind starts to fill in narrative gaps in the disjointed structure that are more disturbing than anything Ballard could come up with. The cool, clinical, obsessive prose and particularly the idead of "a technology of pornography" I found especially enticing. Be on the lookout for his great short "The Terminal Beach"--Traven/Travis appears there too. I don't want every book to be like this, but in a world of Anne Tylers and Mary Higgins Clarks and even (god forbid I take his name in vain!) Charles Frazier it's good to know this stuff is being read and appreciated. My friends think I'm crazy and pretentious for liking it--but I really do!

The short stories (or "condensed novels" as Ballard refers to them) that comprise this astonishing novel can be taken as a series of snapshots of a man in the still centre of a catastrophic psychological breakdown.

The almost static nature of large parts of the book (intensified by sterile settings such as hotel rooms, institutional buildings, multilane highways - in short transitional places with no value other than their ability to lead elsewhere) are due to the main character having lost any awareness of the passage of time.

He has been hollowed out by his mental crash and has filled that emptiness with a timeless and undiscriminating apprehension of everything around him - and this is where the danger of the book comes from. Where, Ballard asks, would someone who saw the world as a series of discrete and unconnected things (and this, perhaps, is where those obsessive lists that intersperse the book come from) start to assign priorities among those things, to start re-building some coherent picture of this chaos of images.

The answer is that Travis (or Traven or Tallis or whoever it is behind the masks the "hero" manufactures) takes the most powerful images he finds as the basis of his new world - and according to Ballard those would be of sex, violence and celebrity.

And so T**** wanders through a empty world watched over by the vast, indifferent and no longer even vaguely human images of fame, finding as much to be aroused by in the gentle but swift rippling of the bodies of two colliding cars as in the complexly intersecting forms of two human bodies.

And yet this flattened affective landscape acquires a topography as T**** learns to, firstly, simply accept this world and then to rejoice in the strange freedom it gives him.

Ballard is often accused of being amoral, and this is perhaps not unfair, but he might retort that he is actually more moral than his critics. He sees a world which has been altered by human perception of it so profoundly that our choice is to either accept those chances, or be swept under piles of a sand that, on microscopic examination, is made up of countless millions of identical pictures of Marilyn Monroe.

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.

The back cover of William S. Burroughs' "Exterminator!" describes the book as an "experimental novel." Because of the book's fragmented, mosaic-like structure, I think you could also describe it as a collection of experimental prose fragments. It's a blend of science fiction, political satire, and linguistic theory, punctuated by violence and gay sex. Burroughs sometimes uses language that mirrors cinematic techniques.

If there's a plot in here, it eluded me. Along the way the reader will encounter a secret agent, a pest exterminator, Scientology, the queen of England, and John Genet. "Exterminator!" is often outrageous and absurd; it feels at times like Burroughs is just writing to amuse himself.

"Exterminator" is made up of a series of short passages that are somehow connected (i think?). There are some parts in the book that I found extremely interesting, like DE (do easy), the idea that evey object has its place, and if it is not in that place it will get in your way; and everything must be done in the easiest possible way. The style of writing may be hard to follow at first, because some of it is in Burrough's cut up style, and the sentences seem to go on and on, but is part of what makes this book unique. Also, this book contains the chapter "The Priest They Called Him" which Burroughs read for his collaboration with Kurt Cobain. And "The End" was used for the Ministry song "Quick Fix". I recommend this book if you are in the mood for an interesting, strange, and unique reading experience.

EXTERMINATOR! A NOVEL is without any question my favorite William S. Burroughs book. The "A Novel" of the title must surely be ironic, because the book is not in any recognizable sense a novel. It is a collection of largely unconnected sketches and scenes. Not every section is a masterpiece, but several are among the most surreal and brilliant things that Burroughs ever wrote. And for anyone who has not previously read any Burroughs, it is a brilliant introduction. I personally find it far more accessible and enjoyable than NAKED LUNCH, which, while it has many fine passages, nonetheless can at times become tedious.

Although by and large the various parts are unconnected, several are focused on the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. In particular, the amazingly creative and hysterically funny "The Coming of the Purple Better One" takes that as its locale. The "Purple Better One" of the title refers to a baboon that is placed upon the convention podium, and upon whose face is superimposed the face of a white Southern, racist politician, whose recorded speech is then played. It is one of the more bizarre, brilliant, and absurd scenes in recent American literature. Another favorite is "The Discipline of DE," the DE standing for "Do Easy." The story is a strange blend of Zen Buddhist tract and self-help manifestation. Other favorites include the title story, with the narrator/exterminator repeating ominously "You want the service?" and a supposed film treatment "Twilight's Last Gleamings."

The collection features many of the themes usually associated with Burroughs: Sci-fi, fantasy, drugs, usual medical practices and phenomena, governmental nefariousness, and the corruption of capitalistic life.

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.

If you liked Naked Lunch, you'll love Wild Boys. William S. Burroughs, in my opinion, one of the great American authors of the twentieth century, offers a tremendously beautiful and rich view into not only his mind, but our own in this book of the dead. Though woven with very visual secenes of homosexuality and even violence, Wild Boys is a rich and intense journey through the ideas of a beatnik and a modern philosopher, who happened to philosophize while addicted to many controlled and illegal substances. Wild Boys paints a picture of a post-apocalyptic world where bands of young boys live on the fringes of society, sometimes terrorizing those who would wander from society to the deserted lands beyond. Wild Boys and Naked Lunch are some of the ew books that have actually changed my perception of the world around me, and I am a different, and I would like to think better person for haveign experienced the "mind blow" that is Burroughs. Read it if you want to experience a new world.

After reading Burroughs' more famous novel, Naked Lunch, I was interested but disappointed. Burroughs was much too high when he wrote it and many parts an incoherant. However, the lucid intervals were very well written and I wanted to read a book he wrote when he was more in control. The Wild Boys is that book. A poignant masterpiece that will push anyone who reads close to tears. Far better than Naked Lunch, anyone who thinks Burroughs was a one-trick pony should read it.

At fourteen I read The Wild Boys and was completely in awe of William S. Burroughsgenius without knowing that others in the world were aware of his genius. Though disturbed and horrified by his imagery of a violent world of homosexual renegade boys, it did not tempt me to judge his work as merely pornographic or solely for those of prurient interests. As soon as I could find a source for procuring "The Naked Lunch"(a local Baptist college!), I tried to read it with the same expectations. Although certainly The Naked Lunch was an excellent work, I was disappointed, for I felt it never even came close in scope or power. Even years later, after having read quite a few of Burroughs books, I feel The Wild Boys to be unsurpassed in the Burroughsian Ouvre! When one of his works proves me wrong, I will write another review. Until then, reader beware, this book will change you, and maybe not for the better. But you will not remain neutral,for certain!