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Junky: The Definitive Text of "Junk" Paperback – November 13, 2012
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In his debut novel, Junky, Burroughs fictionalized his experiences using and peddling heroin and other drugs in the 1950s into a work that reads like a field report from the underworld of post-war America. The Burroughs-like protagonist of the novel, Bill Lee, see-saws between periods of addiction and rehab, using a panoply of substances including heroin, cocaine, marijuana, paregoric (a weak tincture of opium) and goof balls (barbiturate), amongst others. For this definitive edition, renowned Burroughs scholar Oliver Harris has gone back to archival typescripts to re-created the author's original text word by word. From the tenements of New York to the queer bars of New Orleans, Junky takes the reader into a world at once long-forgotten and still with us today. Burroughs’s first novel is a cult classic and a critical part of his oeuvre.
- Print length256 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherGrove Press
- Publication dateNovember 13, 2012
- Dimensions5.4 x 0.7 x 8.2 inches
- ISBN-100802120423
- ISBN-13978-0802120427
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A haunting tale of possession and exorcism, now reissued on the seventieth anniversary of the year of its writing | An outrageous hybrid of pulp science fiction, obscene experimental poetry, and manifesto for revolution | For the Burroughs enthusiast and the neophyte, this volume is a valuable and fresh experience of this classic of our culture. | This new edition clarifies for the first time the extraordinary history of its writing and rewriting | Fires the reader into a textual outer space the better to see our burning planet and the operations of the Nova Mob in all their ugliness. |
Editorial Reviews
Review
Of all the Beat Generation writers, William S. Burroughs was the most dangerous. . . . He was anarchy’s double agent, an implacable enemy of conformity and of all agencies of control-from government to opiates.”Rolling Stone
The most important writer to emerge since World War II. . . . For his sheer visionary power, and for his humor, I admire Burroughs more than any living writer, and most of those who are dead.”J.G. Ballard
William was a Shootist. He shot like he wrotewith extreme precision and no fear.”Hunter S. Thompson
A book of great beauty . . . . Burroughs is the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius.” Norman Mailer
Ever since Naked Lunch . . . Burroughs has been ordained America’s most incendiary artist.”Los Angeles Times
Burroughs voice is hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American.”Joan Didion
In 1953, at the height of American conformism and anti-communist hysteria, William S. Burroughs published Junky, an irresistible strung-out ode to the joys and perversities of drug addiction. . . . Junky eschews allegory for scrupulous realism. . . . More than anything else, Junky reads like a field guide to the American underworld.”The Daily Beast
Retro-cool, like something Don Draper might find in the Greenwich Village pad of that reefer-smoking painter he was seeing in the first season of Mad Men.”Las Vegas Weekly on Naked Lunch
A creator of grim fairy tales for adults, Burroughs spoke to our nightmare fears and, still worse, to our nightmare longings. . . . And more than any other postwar wordsmith, he bridged generations; popularity in the youth culture is greater now than during the heady days of the Beats.”The Los Angeles Times Book Review
Burroughs seems to revel in a new medium . . . a medium totally fantastic, spaceless, timeless, in which the normal sentence is fractured, the cosmic tries to push its way through the bawdry, and the author shakes the reader as a dog shakes a rat.”Anthony Burgess on The Ticket That Exploded
In Burroughs’ hands, writing reverts to acts of magic, as though he were making some enormous infernal encyclopedia of all the black impulses and acts that, once made, would shut the fiends away forever.”The New York Times on The Ticket That Exploded
Macabre, funny, reverberant, grotesque.”The New York Review of Books on Nova Express
Hypnotic; I wish I could quote, but it takes several pages to get high on this stuff. . . . Funny . . . outrageous along the lines of Burroughs’s well-established scatology. He can think of the wildest parodies of erotic exuberance and invent the weirdest places for demonstrating them.”Harper’s Magazine on Nova Express
One of the most interesting pieces of radical fiction we have.”The Nation on The Soft Machine
In Burroughs’ hands, writing reverts to acts of magic, as though he were making some enormous infernal encyclopedia of all the black impulses and acts that, once made, would shut the fiends away forever.”The New York Times on The Wild Boys
Product details
- Publisher : Grove Press; unknown edition (November 13, 2012)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 256 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0802120423
- ISBN-13 : 978-0802120427
- Item Weight : 8 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.4 x 0.7 x 8.2 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #46,811 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #105 in City Life Fiction (Books)
- #4,103 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors
Oliver Harris currently lives in South Korea. He writes the Nick Belsey series of detective novels and the Elliot Kane series of espionage novels.
William Seward Burroughs II (/ˈbʌroʊz/; also known by his pen name William Lee; February 5, 1914 – August 2, 1997) was an American novelist, short story writer, satirist, essayist, painter, and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author who wrote in the paranoid fiction genre, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th century". His influence is considered to have affected a range of popular culture as well as literature. Burroughs wrote eighteen novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays. Five books have been published of his interviews and correspondences. He also collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians, and made many appearances in films.
He was born into a wealthy family in St. Louis, Missouri, grandson of the inventor and founder of the Burroughs Corporation, William Seward Burroughs I, and nephew of public relations manager Ivy Lee. Burroughs began writing essays and journals in early adolescence, but did not begin publicizing his writing until his thirties. He left home in 1932 to attend Harvard University, studied English, and anthropology as a postgraduate, and later attended medical school in Vienna. In 1942 Burroughs enlisted in the U.S. Army to serve during World War II, but was turned down by the Office of Strategic Services and Navy, after which he picked up the drug addiction that affected him for the rest of his life, while working a variety of jobs. In 1943 while living in New York City, he befriended Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, the mutually influential foundation of which grew into the Beat Generation, which was later a defining influence on the 1960s counterculture.
Much of Burroughs's work is semi-autobiographical, primarily drawn from his experiences as a heroin addict, as he lived throughout Mexico City, London, Paris and Tangier in Morocco, as well as from his travels in the South American Amazon. Burroughs accidentally killed his second wife, Joan Vollmer, in 1951 in Mexico City, and was consequently convicted of manslaughter. Finding success with his confessional first novel, Junkie (1953), Burroughs is perhaps best known for his third novel Naked Lunch (1959), a highly controversial work that underwent a court case under the U.S. sodomy laws. With Brion Gysin, he also popularized the literary cut-up technique in works such as The Nova Trilogy (1961–1964).
In 1983, Burroughs was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and in 1984 was awarded the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France. Jack Kerouac called Burroughs the "greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift", a reputation he owes to his "lifelong subversion" of the moral, political and economic systems of modern American society, articulated in often darkly humorous sardonicism. J. G. Ballard considered Burroughs to be "the most important writer to emerge since the Second World War", while Norman Mailer declared him "the only American writer who may be conceivably possessed by genius".
Burroughs had one child, William S. Burroughs, Jr. (1947–1981), with his second wife Joan Vollmer. William Burroughs died at his home in Lawrence, Kansas, after suffering a heart attack in 1997.
Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Allen_Ginsberg_and_William_S._Burroughs.jpg: Marcelo Noah derivative work: Сдобников Андрей [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.
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The main character, Bill, first starts in New York City, where he becomes addicted to 'junk,' he and his friends do everything in their power to acquire it, from stealing money from drunks on the subway to conning senile doctors into writing them morphine prescriptions. After awhile he decides to enter rehab out West, and as soon as he gets himself off the junk, he relapses in New Orleans where a good bulk of the book takes place. There, he is eventually arrested for possession and soon after skips town to Mexico, where he stays for the remainder of the novel and struggles with his on again off again addiction to heroin. The people he meets along the way are all colorful characters who are based on people who are all long dead now, their personae immortalized through Burroughs' unforgettably stylistic prose. That's a very loose summary of the book, granted, you have to read the whole thing the whole way through to really take it all in and understand the world Burroughs/Lee lived in. It's a fascinating trip and being a fan of Burroughs' later works I was shocked when I finished this book that it took me this long to get to it in the first place. You see bits and pieces that would later reappear 'cut-up' in novels like "Naked Lunch" and "Nova Express," as well as some familiar faces like Hauser and O'Brien-- which this book implies were two very real police officers.
I absolutely loved this novel. It's a harrowing tale and a warning to all those who dance with something like heroin. Out of all the novels I've read by Burroughs, from 'Naked Lunch' to 'The Wild Boys' to this very novel's sequel 'Queer,' I think that 'Junky' may be his best work, which is absolutely stellar for a then-inexperienced writer. He wrote what he knew and what he knew was the 'algebra of need,' and this novel presents that by showing Burroughs at his clearest. It is important to remember what the one introduction mentions: This novel is fiction based on fact, not necessarily everything in it is true, but knowing Burroughs, the truth shone through more often than not because of the utter believability of the characters, places and events that transpire throughout this darkly magical novel.
If you read William Burroughs and haven't read "Junky," don't hesitate to buy this book. It's a trip. And for newcomers to William Burroughs, you should absolutely pick it up and start with it, then read 'Queer,' (the sequel to 'Junky' which I actually read before it) and move on to wade through the deep water of Burroughs' dark and fractured and beautiful imagination. This is hands-down, one of the best novels I have ever read in my life and it proudly deserves a spot easily accessible on my bookshelf!