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Naked Lunch @ 50
Anniversary Essays
List Price: £31.95
Availability: Available for immediate despatch
- Book details for Naked Lunch @ 50
- Oliver Harris (editor), Ian MacFadyen (editor), Allen Hibbard (contributions), Eric Andersen (contributions), Gail-Nina Anderson (contributions), Theophile Aries (contributions), Jed Birmingham (contributions), Shaun de Waal (contributions), Richard Doyle (contributions), Loren Glass (contributions)
- Hardback, 229 x 152 x 25mm , 320 pp, 40 illustrations
- 15 May 2009
- Southern Illinois University Press
- 0809329158
- 9780809329151
Celebrating and analyzing a landmark novel that is aberrant, obscene, and blasphemous, "Naked Lunch" was banned, ridiculed, and castigated on publication in 1959, and yet fifty years down the line it has lost nothing of its power to astonish and inspire. A lacerating satire, an exorcism of demons, a grotesque cabinet of horrors, and a landmark experiment in linguistic derangement, it is a work of ecstatic, excoriating laughter and great, transcendent beauty. The first book ever to take on William Burroughs' masterpiece, this critical collection brings together an international array of writers, scholars, musicians, scientists, and artists who cast new eyes on the writing and reception of Burroughs' unique work. Tracing its origins from Texas to Tangier, from Mexico City to New York and Paris, crossing time zones and cultures, "Naked Lunch @ 50" breaks new ground in understanding this most influential but elusive of texts. "Naked Lunch @ 50" includes studies of the text's manuscript and textual history, of its origins in and creative debts to a range of specific locations, of its reception in different societies over time and in relation to broader cultural, artistic, and personal histories. Contributors discuss the novel's existence as a physical object in regard to both design and collectability, the history of its critical reception, its cultural importance in relation to censorship and visionary art, its relationship to literary genres - from science fiction to the horror film - and its significance as a work prophetic of current trends in electronic culture and biology. A series of introductory sections, or 'Dossiers', written by Ian MacFadyen, provide glimpses of further horizons of research and reading, while a set of endpapers by the artist Philip Taaffe offers a visual correlative to Burroughs' extraordinary text.
"I can think of no other work of literary criticism that brings together such a multiplicity of artists, practitioners, and critics in such a dynamic assembly of writing forms. The resulting symbiosis strikes me as a whole new critical form, utterly pertinent to Burroughs' milieu." - Michael Hrebeniak, author of Action Writing: Jack Kerouac's Wild Form"
Oliver Harris, the author of William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination, is a professor of American literature at Keele University. He is the editor of The Letters of William S. Burroughs, 1945-1959, "Everything Lost": The Latin American Notebook of William S. Burroughs, and Burroughs' novels Junky: The Definitive Text of "Junk" and The Yage Letters Redux. Harris is also the author of numerous scholarly articles on Burroughs, the Beat Generation, film noir, and the epistolary form. Ian MacFadyen has written about William S. Burroughs in a number of essays, including "Machine Dreams: Optical Toys and Mechanical Boys" in the collection Flickers of the Dreamachine. His other work includes Ira Cohen's Photographs: A Living Theatre and The Blood of the Poet: Lorca and the Duende.
