The book was originally published with the title The Naked Lunch in Paris in July 1959 by Olympia Press. Or, as the title of Alan Ansen’s 1959 essay on Burroughs put it, “Anyone Who Can Pick Up a Frying Pan Owns Death.

Shortly afterwards, he accidentally kills her while attempting to shoot a drinking glass off her head to emulate William Tell. His theory of language as a virus is closely connected to an (ambivalent) repudiation of Western consciousness in favor of “the savage mind.In court, Sumner argued that the novel was “so obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, indecent and disgusting, that a minute description of the same would be offensive to the Court and improper to be placed upon the record thereof.

While these trials were socially important, Naked Lunch retains its fascination because of the quality of its writing and because in it Burroughs tackled subjects that are still highly relevant. Burroughs wrote 18 novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays.David Lodge admitted that Burroughs had "a certain literary talent", but felt that the novel's initial excitement quickly became boring, confused, and unsatisfying. Though Naked Lunch's publication inspired trials in both Boston and Los Angeles, the former is by far the most famous, if for no other reason than it featured both Allen Ginsberg and Norman Mailer, who testified in the novel's defence. Burroughs’s literary influence on Kathy Acker, Dennis Cooper, David Wojnarowicz, and myself is as various as we are and probably something for others to elucidate. A nice original copy of the third printing of the first UK paperback edition of this iconic cult title. Cronenberg massively rewrote the script a few days before filming due to being unable to shoot in Tangiers.

For more details on what “brutal, obscene, and disgusting means,” consider this: two weeks after the Boston trial, the book was also challenged in a Los Angeles court, in which the prosecutor pointed out to the Court “that the following words are used in the book a total of 234 times on 235 pages. His “pranks” included dressing as a giant penis for a social function and releasing aphrodisiac-inducing insects at the opening of the New York Metropolitan Opera. In the late 1950s, no publisher in New York or London would have flattered Naked Lunch with a second glance.In 1962, the German translation of the novel intentionally left some of the most explicit sections as untranslated English. The following is a summary of some of the events in the book that could be considered the most relevant. In Chapters 1-5, the narrator, Lee, a heroin user and small-time dealer, escapes an undercover police officer who has been tracking him by leaping onto a subway train. Girodias has been characterised as a swindler and a pornographer with no literary taste, but his record speaks for itself: the first publication of Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, Samuel Beckett's Watt, followed by the Trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable), then The Ginger Man, early English translations of Jean Genet and Guillaume Apollinaire, and much else besides. We take pride in offering a wide selection of used books, from classics to hidden gems, ensuring there?

He opened the novel to chance operations, using the “cut-up” and “fold-in” techniques he had developed with Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville. Benway is an adviser to the fictional republic of Freeland but used to be responsible for the demoralization of the citizenry of another state, Annexia. When the book came out in the United States in 1962, the definite article was dropped, and the author's middle initial added, signifying the ancestral family name Seward. Burroughs recycles phrases, “routines,” descriptions, and characters through successive works as if they were musical figures or colors in a paint box.Includes the Massachusetts Supreme Court Decision and excerpts from the Boston Trial as part of the lengthy introductory sections.