The Restored text
The anarchic, phenomenally strong-sellling classic from the godfather of the Beats. Welcome to Interzone! Say hello to Bradley the Buyer, the best narcotics agent in the business. Check yourself into the hospital where Dr Benway works - but don't expect adrenalin if you need it (the night porter shot it up for kicks). Meet Dr 'Fingers' Schafer, the Lobotomy Kid, and his greatest creation, 'The Complete American De-anxietized Man', a marvel of invasive psychiatry who has been reduced to nothing but a spinal cord. Told by an Ivy League-educated narcotics addict, 'Naked Lunch' juxtaposes two journeys: the narrator's physical progress from America to North Africa, via Mexico, and a terrifying descent into his own altered consciousness. In this 'Interzone', loosely based on Burroughs' temporary home of Tangier, sex, drugs and murder are the most basic of commodities, and the basest desires have become completely banal. Provocative, influential, morbidly fascinating and mordantly funny, 'Naked Lunch' takes us on an exhilarating ride through the darkest recesses of the human psyche - a ride which stunned the literary world when first published in the 1950s, and is still guaranteed to shock. This edition uses the definitive, restored text, compiled by Burroughs scholar Barry Miles and Burroughs' longtime editor James Grauerholz. It incorporates all of Burroughs' notes and accompanying essays, as well as recently discovered alternate drafts from the original manuscript and letters from Burroughs' private correspondence.
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'. Originally published by the daring and influential Olympia Press (the original publishers of Henry Miller) in France in 1959, it aroused great controversy on publication and was not available in the US until 1962 and in the UK until 1964. The book was adapted for film by David Cronenberg in 1991. William Burroughs died in 1997. A literary landmark and the most shocking novel in the English language, William Burroughs' 'Naked Lunch' is an exhilarating ride into the darkest recesses of the human psyche. Meet Bradley the Buyer, the best narcotics agent in the business. Say hello to Dr 'Fingers' Schafer, the Lobotomy Kid, and the sadistic, manipulative Dr Benway. And then there's our narrator, Bill Lee, an Ivy League-educated narcotics addict. This is the story of Bill's flight south from New York to a drug-and-sex-soaked retreat in Tangiers, where ambiguous Good and enticing Evil vie for the human soul. Welcome to Interzone ...'Naked Lunch' is a masterpiece of modern literature by the godfather of the Beat writers: as provocative and mordantly funny today as it was in 1959.