William S Burroughs Books In Order

Nova Trilogy Books In Order

  1. The Soft Machine (1961)
  2. The Ticket That Exploded (1962)
  3. Nova Express (1964)

Cities of the Night Books In Order

  1. Cities of the Red Night (1981)
  2. The Place of Dead Roads (1984)
  3. The Western Lands (1987)

Novels

  1. Junkie (1953)
  2. Naked Lunch (1959)
  3. Exterminator! (1960)
  4. Dead Fingers Talk (1963)
  5. The Last Words of Dutch Schultz (1970)
  6. The Wild Boys (1971)
  7. Port of Saints (1975)
  8. The Book of Breathing (1979)
  9. Queer (1985)
  10. And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks (2008)
  11. Rules of Duel (2010)

Collections

  1. The Third Mind (1978)
  2. Ali’s Smile / Naked Scientology (1978)
  3. A William Burroughs Reader (1982)
  4. Word Virus (1984)
  5. The Burroughs File (1984)
  6. The Adding Machine (1985)
  7. Interzone (1989)

Plays

  1. Come in with the Dutchman (2016)

Novellas

  1. White Subway (1974)
  2. Blade Runner (1979)
  3. Ghost of Chance (1991)
  4. The Cat Inside (1992)
  5. The Finger (2018)

Non fiction

  1. The Yage Letters (1963)
  2. Snack (1975)
  3. Burroughs Live (1977)
  4. Letters to Allen Ginsberg, 1953-1957 (1981)
  5. The Job (1982)
  6. Burroughs (1988)
  7. My Education (1989)
  8. Last Words (1990)
  9. With William Burroughs (1991)
  10. Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs (1993)
  11. The Letters of William S. Burroughs (1993)
  12. Conversations with William Burroughs (1995)
  13. A Burroughs Compendium (1998)
  14. Call Me Burroughs (1998)
  15. Evil River (2007)
  16. Everything Lost (2007)
  17. Rub Out the Words (2012)

Nova Trilogy Book Covers

Cities of the Night Book Covers

Novels Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

Plays Book Covers

Novellas Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

William S Burroughs Books Overview

The Soft Machine

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.

The Ticket That Exploded

In The Ticket That Exploded, William S. Burroughs’s grand cut up trilogy, which began with The Soft Machine and continues through Nova Express, reaches its climax as Inspector Lee and the Nova Police engage the Nova Mob in a decisive battle for the planet.

Nova Express

Nova Express takes William S. Burroughs’s nightmarish future one step beyond The Soft Machine. The diabolical Nova criminals have gained control and plan on wreaking untold destruction. It s up to Inspector Lee of the Nova Police to attack and dismantle the word and imagery machine of these control addicts before it s too late.

Cities of the Red Night

While young men wage war against an evil empire of zealous mutants, the population of this modern inferno is afflicted with the epidemic of a radioactive virus. An opium infused apocalyptic vision from the legendary author of Naked Lunch is the first of the trilogy with The Places of the Dead Roads and his final novel, The Western Plains.

The Place of Dead Roads

A good old fashioned shoot out in the American West of the frontier days serves as the springboard for this hyperkinetic adventure in which gunslingers lead by Kim Carson fight for galactic freedom. AUTHORBIO: William S. Burroughs was born in St. Louis in 1914. His many other works include NAKED LUNCH and JUNKY. Described by Norman Mailer as one of America’s few writers genuinely ‘possessed by genius,’ he died in 1997.

The Western Lands

Burroughs’s eagerly awaited final novel in the trilogy begun with Cities of the Red Night and The Place of Dead Roads is a profound, revealing, and often astonishing meditation on mortality, loneliness, nuclear peril, and the inextinguishable hope for life after death.

Junkie

Before his 1959 breakthrough, Naked Lunch, an unknown William S. Burroughs wrote Junk, his first book, a candid, eyewitness account of times and places that are now long gone. This book brings them vividly to life again; it is an unvarnished field report from the American postwar underground. For this definitive 50th anniversary edition, eminent Burroughs scholar Oliver Harris has painstakingly re created the author’s original text, word by word, from archival typescripts. Here for the first time are Burroughs’s own unpublished Introduction and an entire omitted chapter, along with many ‘lost’ passages and auxiliary texts by Allen Ginsberg and others. Harris’s comprehensive Introduction reveals the composition history of Junk’s text and places its contents against a lively historical background.

Naked Lunch

The anarchic, phenomenally strong selling classic from the godfather of the Beats, featuring for the first time the restored text, all the accompanying essays, and newly discovered material from the original manuscript. Revitalised with a cool new jacket and an anecdote packed P.S. Section. 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 repressed 1950s, and is still guaranteed to epater more than a few bourgeois. Over forty years since first publication, Burroughs scholar Barry Miles and Burroughs’ longtime editor James Grauerholz have compiled this definitive restored text, correcting numerous errors that have accumulated over the years, and incorporating all of Burroughs’ notes and accompanying essays. Most exciting of all, this edition includes an appendix of newly discovered, never before seen material including alternate drafts from the original manuscript and letters from Burroughs’ private correspondence.

Exterminator!

A man, dispirited by ageing, endeavours to steal a younger man’s face; a doctor yearns for a virus that might eliminate his discomfort by turning everyone else into doubles of himself; a Colonel lays out the precepts of the life of DE Do Easy; conspirators posthumously succeed in blowing up a train full of nerve gas; a mandrill known as the Purple Better One runs for the presidency with brutal results; and the world drifts towards apocalypses of violence, climate and plague. The hallucinatory landscape of William Burroughs compellingly bizarre, fragmented novel is constantly shifting, something sinister always just beneath the surface.

The Wild Boys

The Wild Boys is a futuristic tale of global warfare in which a guerrilla gang of boys dedicated to freedom battles the organized armies of repressive police states. Making full use of his inimitable humor, wild imagination, and style, Burroughs creates a world that is as terrifying as it is fascinating.

Port of Saints

Somewhere a long time ago the summer ended…
.

Queer

Traduit de l anglais tats Unis par Sylvie Durastanti et Christine Laferri re. Queer est le r cit hallucin d une errance, d un mal de vivre incurable qui a pour toile de fond un Mexique couleur de cauchemar, avec son soleil obs dant, ses tendues de t les ondul es et toute une faune pittoresque et violente. Lee, d senchant , erre de bar en bar, noyant son d sespoir dans l alcool et la drague. Son seul rep re : Allerton, jeune homme indolent jaloux de son ind pendance, mais aussi secr tement flatt d tre l objet de sa convoitise. force de’s duction, de pr venance et de t nacit , Lee parviendra ses fins et accompagnera son compagnon dans une exp dition travers l Am rique du Sud la recherche d une myst rieuse drogue, le Yage, connue pour ses pouvoirs t l pathiques. Queer est essentiellement une peinture du manque, le r cit d une douloureuse tentative de sevrage. Par del son exotisme sulfureux, ce roman est une remarquable radiographie de la d tresse. Parution simultan e en format poche aux ditions Christian Bourgois : Le M tro blanc et autres histoires. Parution simultan e aux ditions Tristam : Le Porte lame.

And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks

More than sixty years ago, William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac sat down inNew York City to write a novel about the summer of 1944, when one of their friends killed another in a moment of brutal and tragic bloodshed. The two authors were then at the dawn of their careers, having yet to write anything of note. Alternating chapters and narrators, Burroughs and Kerouac pieced together a hard boiled tale of bohemian New York during World War II, full of drugs and obsession, art and violence. The manuscript, called And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks after a line from a news story about a fire at a circus, was submitted to publishers but rejected and confined to a filing cabinet for decades. This legendary collaboration between two of the twentieth centuries most influential writers is set to be published for the first time in the fall of 2008. A remarkable, fascinating piece of American literary history, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks is also an engrossing, atmospheric novel that brings to life a shocking murder at the dawn of the Beat Generation.

Ali’s Smile / Naked Scientology

Nonfiction. NAKED SCIENTOLOGY contains articles and letters by Burroughs critiquing Scientology, a religion with which he was involved for some time and toward which he maintains a reserved curiosity. According to Burroughs, some of the techniques are highly valuable and warrant further study and experimentation, while on the other hand he is in flat disagreement with the organizational policy. ALI’S SMILE is a hallucinatory dream tale that loosely takes as its subject the negative effects of Scientology. Bilingual, in English and German.

Word Virus

With the publication of Naked Lunch in 1959, William Burroughs abruptly brought international letters into the postmodern age. Beginning with his very early writing including a chapter from his and Jack Kerouac’s never before seen collaborative novel, Word Virus follows the arc of Burroughs’s remarkable career, from his darkly hilarious ‘routines’ to the experimental cut up novels to Cities of the Red Night and The Cat Inside. Beautifully edited and complemented by James Grauerholz’s illuminating biographical essays, Word Virus charts Burroughs’s major themes and places the work in the context of the life. It is an excellent tool for the scholar and a delight for the general reader. Throughout a career that spanned half of the twentieth century, William S. Burroughs managed continually to be a visionary among writers. When he died in 1997, the world of letters lost its most elegant outsider.

Interzone

First Naked Lunch, Burroughs’s original manuscript entitled Interzone includes a long and brilliant section known as ‘WORD.’ This previously unpublished text is the highlight of Interzone.

Blade Runner

the movie got its title from this earlier book

Ghost of Chance

Ghost of Chance is an adventure story set in the jungle of Madagascar and filled with the obsessions that mark the work of the man who Norman Mailer once called, the only American writer possessed by genius. While tripping through the author’s trademark concerns drugs, paranoia, and lemurs, this short novel tells an important story about environmental devastation in a way that only Burroughs can. Born in 1914, William S. Burroughs is the author of Junky, Naked Lunch and The Soft Machine and many other contemporary classics. A major figure of 20th century American literature, Burroughs died in 1997.

The Cat Inside

Best known for the wild, phantasmagoric satire of works like Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs reveals another, gentler side in The Cat Inside. Originally published as a limited edition volume, this moving and witty discourse on cats combines deadpan routines and dream passages with a heartwarming account of Burroughs’s unexpected friendships with the many cats he has known. It is also a meditation on the long, mysterious relationship between cats and their human hosts, which Burroughs traces back to the Egyptian cult of the ‘animal other.’ With its street sense and whiplash prose, The Cat Inside is a genuine revelation for Burroughs fans and cat lovers alike. ‘The Cat Inside is about how Burroughs’s contact with cats put him in touch with himself. Cats have changed his dreams; they are psychic guides who have allowed his wounded inner child to come out.’ Harper’s Bazaar ‘Burroughs’s book is about cats the way The Grapes of Wrath is about fruit…
. These are haunting images, from dreams, memory and present day, ranging from unabashed affection to outrage and indignation.’ Los Angeles Times

The Yage Letters

The Yage Letters: an early epistolary novel by William S. Burroughs, whose 1952 account of himself as Junkie, published under the pseudonym William Lee, ended ‘Yage may be the final fix.’ In letters to Allen Ginsberg, an unknown young poet in New York, his journey to the Amazon jungle is recorded, detailing picaresque incidents of search for telepathic hallucinogenic mind expanding drug Yage Ayahuasca, or Banisteriopsis Caap used by Amazon Indian doctors for finding lost objects, mostly bodies and souls. Author and recipient of these letters met again in New York, Xmas 1953, pruned and edited the writings to form a single book. Correspondence contains first seeds of later Burroughsian fantasy in Naked Lunch. Seven years later Ginsberg in Peru writes his old guru an account of his own visions and terrors with the same drug, appealing for further counsel. Burroughs’ mysterious reply is sent. The volume concludes with two epilogues: a short note from Ginsberg on his return from the Orient years later reassuring Self that he is still here on earth, and a final poetic cut up by Burroughs, ‘I Am Dying Meester?’

Burroughs Live

Burroughs Live gathers all the interviews, both published and unpublished, given by William Burroughs, as well as conversations with well known writers, artists, and musicians such as Tenessee Williams, Timothy Leary, Patti Smith, Keith Richards, Allen Ginsberg, Brion Gysin, and Gregory Corso. The book provides a fascinating account of Burroughs’s life as a literary outlaw. Illuminating many aspects of his work and many facets of his mind, it brings out his scathing humor, powerful intelligence, and nightmarish vision.

The Job

In these interviews, Burroughs tells the gripping story of his drug addiction and cure, and voices his often barbed views on youth, sex, drugs, writing, politics, revolution, the family, silence, organ therapy, money, and prayer.

My Education

In his latest book, Burroughs pushes into new territory, once again committing the unspeakable crime of questioning the reality structure. Dreams, always a rich source of imagery in Burroughs’ works, here become a direct and powerful force. My Education, direct, honest, humorous and subversive, is a truly original work.

Last Words

Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs is the most intimate book ever written by William S. Burroughs, the author of Naked Lunch and one of the most celebrated literary outlaws of our time. Last Words is a complex portrait of Burroughs at the end of his life, coming to terms with aging and death. While laid out as simple diary entries of the last nine months of his life, Last Words spans the realms of cultural criticism, personal memoir, and fiction. Classic Burroughs concerns his rants on U.S. drug policy, his contempt for the state of the human race, his love for his cats permeate the book. Burroughs breaks into classic ‘routines’ and provides frequent commentary on whatever he is reading from high literature to low brow thrillers. Whether occupied with the banalities of life housekeeping, dealing with doctors or the glories shooting a video with U2, opening a museum show of his paintings, the ‘Old Man’ emerges as frequently comical, sometimes meditative, and always engaged a commentator on the state of the world and the self. Most significantly, Last Words contains some of the most brutally personal prose Burroughs has ever written. His reflections on the deaths of his friends Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary provide a window onto the preparations Burroughs was making for his own death a quest for absolution marked by a profound sense of guilt and loss. Last Words is unlike anything else in the oeuvre of William S. Burroughs. It is the purest, most personal work ever presented by this writer, and a poignant portrait of the man, his life, and his creative process one that never quit, even in the shadow of death.

With William Burroughs

Burroughs, the eccentric, brilliant artist who burned the bridge with logic and wrote the classic Naked Lunch, has a court recorder in Victor Bockris. Bockris has collected into a cogent whole the man’s most brilliant moments of conversation, thinking, and interview repartee. This fascinating material, gleaned from the fertile time at Burroughs’s New York headquarters, the Bunker which was located on the Bowery, three blocks from CBGB, encompas*ses the years 1974 to 1980, and also includes a 1991 Burroughs interview from Interview magazine. The Beats’ devotion to subjective experience has left readers with a profound amount of objective material to analyze and debate. Choice public and private utterances, hallucinatory and prescient diatribes such as these, remain rich sources of literary history. As Americans we find the Beats’ approach to life romantic, even heroic. Tearing the walls down in the name of freedom and spirituality strikes a particularly pilgrimesque chord. With William Burroughs: A Report from the Bunker is a fascinating compendium of Burroughs speak, so complete it can be considered a credo.

The Letters of William S. Burroughs

This volume of correspondence vividly documents the personal and cultural history through which Burroughs developed, revealing clues to illuminate his life and keys to open up his text. ‘Sheds light on both the personal demons and lacerating misanthropy that inspired Burroughs’ brilliant literary highjinks.’ Entertainment Weekly.

Conversations with William Burroughs

Although a rather shy, private man, William Burroughs gave a good many interviews during his lifetime, some in prominent publications, others in obscure forums. The interviews collected here provide an aperture into the philosophies, methods, and quirks of a man who wrote Queer, Junky, Naked Lunch, Nova Express, Cities of the Red Night, My Education, and many other works. When he died in 1997, Burroughs was likely one of the most widely recognizable figures in contemporary American literature. His image circulated on album jackets, in Nike commercials, and in films, as though proving his notion that pictures and words are viruses, invading any receptive host, taking hold, and replicating themselves. Not surprisingly, the topics Burroughs touches upon are wide ranging: his relationships to the Beats, legends surrounding his personal life, drugs, gay liberation, collaboration, the cut up technique, science fiction, politics, conspiracy theory, censorship, cats, guns, David Cronenberg’s movie adaptation of Naked Lunch, shotgun art, dreams, and life in Lawrence, Kansas, where he spent his last years. From these interviews emerges a full, undiluted portait of a writer who is difficult to capture in biography. Speaking of the Paris Review interview Alfred Kazin calls Burroughs ‘an engineer of the pen, a calmly interested specialist of the new processes. When Burroughs makes philosophic and scientific claims for his disorderly collections of data, we happily recognize under the externally calm surface of the interview, the kind of inner frenzy that is his genius and which, in all of us, his books make an appeal.’ Kazin’s view applies as well for the other interviews in this collection. Allen Hibbard is an associate professor of English and the director of graduate studies at Middle Tennessee State University. He is the author of Paul Bowles: A Study of the Short Fiction and of many articles.

A Burroughs Compendium

The ultimate compendium of previously unpublished interviews, memories and messages on William Burroughs by some of the people that knew him best. most of these pieces relate to his later years up to his death in 1997. This is a compelling, inspiring read that provides an insight into numerous aspects of Burroughs’ exploits and thoughts in later life. The book also includes some rare photographs of Burroughs by Allen Ginsberg, Beat photographer extraordinaire Chris Felver, Lee Ranaldo, John Blumb and Mellon Tytell amongst others. This book is a treasure not to be missed and represents an outstanding addition to the deep reservoir of works on one of the most influential writers and thinkers of the 20th Century

Everything Lost

In late summer 1953, as he returned to Mexico City after a seven month expedition through the jungles of Ecuador, Colombia, and Peru, William Burroughs began a notebook of final reflections on his four years in Latin America. His first novel, Junkie, had just been published and he would soon be back in New York to meet Allen Ginsberg and together complete the manuscripts of what became The Yage Letters and Queer. Yet this notebook, the sole survivor from that period, reveals Burroughs not as a writer on the verge of success, but as a man staring down personal catastrophe and visions of looming cultural disaster. Losses that will not let go of him haunt Burroughs throughout the notebook: Bits of it keep floating back to me like memories of a daytime nightmare. However, out of these dark reflections we see emerge vivid fragments of Burroughs fiction and, even more tellingly, unique, primary evidence for the remarkable ways in which his early manuscripts evolved. Assembled in facsimile and transcribed by Geoffrey D. Smith, John M. Bennett, and Burroughs scholar Oliver Harris, the notebook forces us to change the way we see both Burroughs and his writing at a turning point in his literary biography.

Rub Out the Words

William S. Burroughs was one of the twentieth century’s most iconoclastic literary and artistic figures, an inimitable writer whose groundbreaking work in novels such as Junky and Naked Lunch forever altered the shape of American culture. Now, in this long anticipated collection, editor Bill Morgan takes readers through Burroughs correspondence from the early sixties through the mid seventies, in more than three hundred letters that document Burroughs steady drift away from the Beat circle and that witness an era in which he became the center of a new coterie of creative people who would establish his reputation as an influential artistic and cultural leader beyond the literary world, toward multimedia. Written to recipients such as Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, Timothy Leary, and Burroughs son, Billy Burroughs Jr., these letters shed new light on the writer s controversial artistic process and literary experimentation, as well as his complex personal life. Here are letters to new friends in North Africa and Eur ope partners in Burroughs expatriate life including Paul Bowles, Ian Sommerville, Michael Portman, Alex Trocchi, and the surrealist artist Brion Gysin, who became a close confidant and whose cut up method would deeply influence Burroughs writing. An intimate glimpse into the private life of an often misunderstood artist, Rub Out the Words is also an unforgettable portrait of one of the twentieth century s most uncompromising literary personalities.

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