Naked Lunch is one of the most important novels of the twentieth century. Exerting its influence on the work of authors like Thomas Pynchon, J. G. Ballard, and William Gibson, on the relationship of art and obscenity, and on the shape of music, film, and media generally, it is one of the books that redefined not just literature but American culture. Reedited by Burroughs scholar Barry Miles and Burroughs's longtime editor James Grauerholz, Naked Lunch: The Restored Text includes many editorial corrections to errors present in previous editions, and incorporates Burroughs's notes on the text, several essays he wrote over the years about the book, and an appendix of 20 percent all-new material and alternate drafts from the original manuscript, which predates the first published version. For the Burroughs enthusiast and the neophyte, this volume is a valuable and fresh experience of this classic of our culture.
"He was," as Salon's Gary Kamyia notes, "20th-century drug culture's Poe, its Artaud, its Baudelaire. He was the prophet of the literature of pure experience, a phenomenologist of dread.... Burroughs had the scary genius to turn the junk wasteland into a parallel universe, one as thoroughly and obsessively rendered as Blake's."
Why has this homosexual ex-junkie, whose claim to fame rests entirely on one book--the hallucinogenic ravings of a heroin addict--so seized the collective imagination? Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch in a Tangier, Morocco, hotel room between 1954 and 1957. Allen Ginsberg and his beatnik cronies burst onto the scene, rescued the manuscript from the food-encrusted floor, and introduced some order to the pages. It was published in Paris in 1959 by the notorious Olympia Press and in the U.S. in 1962; the landmark obscenity trial that ensued served to end literary censorship in America.
Burroughs's literary experiment--the much-touted "cut-up" technique--mirrored the workings of a junkie's brain. But it was junk coupled with vision: Burroughs makes teeming amalgam of allegory, sci-fi, and non-linear narration, all wrapped in a blend of humor--slapstick, Swiftian, slang-infested humor. What is Naked Lunch about? People turn into blobs amidst the sort of evil that R. Crumb, in the decades to come, would inimitably flesh out with his dark and creepy cartoon images. Perhaps the most easily grasped part of Naked Lunch is its America-bashing, replete with slang and vitriol. Read it and see for yourself.

Customer Reviews:

Avg. Customer Rating: 4.0 / 5.0

hell drugs and more:

I find myself rereading this book, sometimes just as I finish the last chapter. With each read, I pick up more beautiful language that makes me love this books more. Disturbing at parts, it makes for a graphic nightmare but expressed with such beautiful writing the book becomes a must read. Highly recommended.

huh?:

this has nothing to do with lunch or nakedness.
i'm very dissapointed. is there no literature on folks who like to eat their lunch in the nude?

NOT LITERATURE!!!! (ZERO STARS!!!!!):

This is not literature so much as a LIBERAL ATHEIST'S heroin laced premonition in the 1950's of all books having (sadly) been approved by the authorities here in the present, and my opinion of the author's own serious problems is way beyond me. And it is just like some JESUS HATING BABY KILLING SCUM like a "BEAT" or a "HIPPY" or a "PUNK ROCKER" or people reading this book and giving it to their children to read and read again which is like some kind of cult, reading literature, and trying not to be READING... more info

Beyond Good & Evil:

Burroughs' work is a reaction to post -1945 cold war America in its radical deployment of tone, style and content. It endured bans, censorship and obscenity trials before hitting bookstores in the early nineteen sixties. But for all that, its continuing power is as spiritual work that makes it more than merely a insightful document of its times.
"Naked Lunch" is no "Ulysses" and yet it shares a kinship with that masterwork. Not so much the use of stream of consciousness but in other stylistic aspects;... more info

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