Burroughs, William S. Series

Word Virus the William S. Burroughs Reader the William S. Burroughs Reader

"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.

The Ticket That Exploded

by William S. Burroughs

Published 1 December 1967

An outrageous hybrid of pulp science fiction, obscene experimental poetry, and manifesto for revolution, The Ticket That Exploded is a last chance antidote to the virus of lies spread by the ad men and con men of the Nova Mob, a call to arms against those driving our planet toward the point of destruction. Like the other two volumes of Burroughs' Cut-Up Trilogy, The Soft Machine and Nova Express, it is today as fresh in its form and as urgent in its message as it has ever been.

Edited and introduced by renowned Burroughs scholar Oliver Harris, this new edition reveals how the book's cultural reach has expanded with the viral logic of Burroughs' multi-media creative methods.

Nova Express

by William S. Burroughs

Published 1 December 1964

The diabolical Nova Criminals now include the nightmarish characters of Sammy the Butcher, Iron Claws, Izzy the Push and the Brown Artist, and are poised to wreak untold destruction on the world with their new-found control. Only Inspector Lee of the Nova Police has any chance of stopping them, by dismantling the word and image machine before it's too late. The third book of Burroughs's linguistically prophetic 'cut-up' trilogy - following The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded - Nova Express is a hilarious and Swiftian parody of bureaucracy and the frailty of the human animal.

The Soft Machine

by William S. Burroughs

Published 1 December 1966

A terrifying, surreal space-age odyssey, The Soft Machine initiated Burroughs' Cut-Up Trilogy that includes Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded. The book draws the reader into an unmappable textual space, where nothing is true and everything is permitted, to make a total assault on the colonising powers of planet earth that have turned us all into machines.

Edited and introduced by renowned Burroughs scholar Oliver Harris, this new edition clarifies for the first time the extraordinary history of The Soft Machine's writing and rewriting, demolishing the myths of Burroughs' chance-based writing methods and demonstrating for a new generation the significance of his greatest experiment.

Last Words

by William S. Burroughs

Published 15 May 2000

William Burroughs died in August 1997, after a lifetime of notoriety. In his final years, he was writing only in his journals. The last nine months of his diaries are here, in "Last Words", and they form a complex, rarely seen, personal portrait of Burroughs at the end of his life, coming to terms with aging and death. Although well into his eighties, the man we see is nevertheless the same old Burroughs, still riling against the Establishment, still contemptuous of the state of the human race, still shocking, bleak and very funny. Full of anecdotes and memories, entries on the joys of housekeeping, dealing with doctors, shooting a video with U2, musings on his beloved cats, drug-taking and government cover-ups, "Last Words" shows us a man reflective but still engaged with the state of the world. Most significantly, these journals contain some of the most brutally personal prose Burroughs has ever written. His thoughts on the deaths of his friends Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary provide a window onto the preparations Burroughs was making for his own profound sense of guilt and loss. "Last Words" is unilke anything else in the oeuvre of William Burroughs.
It is the purest, most personal work ever presented by this writer, an a poignant portrait of the man, his life and his creative process - one that never quit, even in the shadow of death.