William S Burroughs

Since its original publication in Paris in 1959, Naked Lunch has become one of the most important novels of the twentieth century. Exerting its influence on the relationship of art and obscenity, it is one of the books that redefined not just literature but American culture. For the Burroughs enthusiast and the neophyte, this volume—that contains final-draft typescripts, numerous unpublished contemporaneous writings by Burroughs, his own later introductions...

In Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs revealed his genius. In The Soft Machine he begins an adventure that will take us even further into the dark recesses of his imagination, a region where nothing is sacred, nothing taboo. Continuing his ferocious verbal assault on hatred, hype, poverty, war, bureaucracy, and addiction in all its forms, Burroughs gives us a surreal space odyssey through the wounded galaxies in a book only he could create.

Filmmaker Chuck Workman explores the lives, works and influence of four leading lights of the "Beat Generation" of the 1950s: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Neal Cassady. Cutting back and forth between archival footage of his subjects and readings of selections from the authors' works, he creates a fast-paced collage of images that show how the Beats became the dominant counter-cultural movement of the last half of America's 20th...