Bill Lee, an addict-hustler, travels to Mexico and then Tangier in order to find easy access to drugs, and ends up in the Interzone, a bizarre fantasy world

Naked Lunch was banned, castigated, and recognized as a work of genius on its first publication in 1959, and fifty years later it has lost nothing of its power to astonish, shock, and inspire. A lacerating satire, an exorcism of demons, a grotesque cabinet of horrors, it is the Black Book of the Beat Generation, the forerunner of the psychedelic counterculture, and a progenitor of postmodernism and the digital age. A work of excoriating laughter, linguistic derangement, and transcendent beauty, it remains both influential and inimitable. This is the first book devoted in its entirety to William Burroughs' masterpiece, bringing together an international array of scholars, artists, musicians, and academics from many fields to explore the origins, writing, reception, and complex meanings of Naked Lunch. Tracking the legendary book from Texas and Mexico to New York, Tangier, and Paris, Naked Lunch@50 significantly advances our understanding and appreciation of this most elusive and uncanny of texts. Contributors: Contributors: Keith Albarn Eric Andersen Gail-Nina Anderson Théophile Aries Jed Birmingham Shaun de Waal Richard Doyle Loren Glass Oliver Harris Kurt Hemmer Allen Hibbard Rob Holton Andrew Hussey Rob Johnson Jean-Jacques Lebel Ian MacFadyen Polina Mackay Jonas Mekas Barry Miles R. B. Morris Timothy S. Murphy Jurgen Ploog Davis Schneiderman Jennie Skerl DJ Spooky Philip Taaffe

Bill Lee, an addict-hustler, travels to Mexico and then Tangier in order to find easy access to drugs, and ends up in the Interzone, a bizarre fantasy world

The anarchic, phenomenally strong-sellling classic from the godfather of the Beats.

A 50th anniversary edition of the influential 20th-century work finds an unmoored addict making his way through a nightmarish wasteland, a tale that offers insight into period taboos. By the author of Nova Express.

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.

Interzone portrays the development of Burroughs's mature writing style by presenting a selection of pieces from the mid-1950s. His outrageous tone of voice represents the exorcism of four decades of oppressive sexual and social conditioning. Burroughs's close observations of humanity - its ugliness and ignorance - invites the reader to dispense with their traditional notions of decorum, and taste the world as he sees it.

The Mahabharata is one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India. It is of immense importance to the culture of the Indian subcontinent, and is a major text of Hinduism. Its discussion of human goals (artha or 'purpose', kama or 'pleasure', dharma or 'duty', and moksha or 'liberation') takes place in a long-standing tradition, attempting to explain the relationship of the individual to society and the world (the nature of the 'Self') and the workings of karma.

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.

Set in Mexico City during the early fifities, the story follows William Lee from bar to bar in the American expatriate scene as he pursues a young man named Allerton.

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.

For more than 30 years, David Cronenberg has produced films, mostly outside the Studio system, which continue to disturb, surprise and challenge audiences. He has also been repeatedly drawn to literary fiction for inspiration, adapting works by figures like William Burroughs, J.G. Ballard and Patrick McGrath. This book is only the second single-authored study on Cronenberg and as well as containing the first detailed analysis of eXistenZ (1999) Spider (2003) and A History of Violence (2005), it is the first to explore how understanding certain written texts, from both underground and mainstream fiction, can help us understand how Cronenberg's films work.