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Naked Lunch
Naked Lunch
Author: William S. Burroughs
"He was," as Salon's Gary Kamyia notes, "20th-century drug culture's Poe, its Artaud, its Baudelaire. He was the prophet of the literature of pure experience, a phenomenologist of dread.... Burroughs had the scary genius to turn the junk wasteland into a parallel universe, one as thoroughly and obsessively rendere...  more »
ISBN-13: 9780586085608
ISBN-10: 0586085602
Publication Date: 11/20/1986
Pages: 208
Edition: New Ed
Rating:
  • Currently 4.2/5 Stars.
 3

4.2 stars, based on 3 ratings
Publisher: Flamingo
Book Type: Paperback
Other Versions: Hardcover, Audio Cassette, Audio CD
Members Wishing: 0
Reviews: Member | Amazon | Write a Review

Top Member Book Reviews

reviewed Naked Lunch on + 50 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 5
Like the bad seed of Hunter S. Thompson's "Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas" meets "A Clockwork Orange". Although Thompson's detailed accounts of his various drug trips tended to be overly-long, they were at least amusing to laugh-out-loud funny; and Clockwork was super-creative and interesting about its invented language. This unintelligible mess - which the book jacket described as a "meaningful search for true values" (?!) - was penned while the author was a full-blown heroin addict, complete with every junkie drug-use term every invented, and endless (endless!) descriptions of the grinding squalor and misery that go with being said junkie.

Burroughs claims not to remember writing any of it, which is probably a smart move because I know if I were held responsible for having authored this, I would probably do the same.
reviewed Naked Lunch on + 18 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 4
This book is very good if you read it like poetry i.e. random pages at a time. It doesn't make sense since it is not supposed to. I highly reccomend reading the history about it before hand or else it just seems like a long trip. I found out later that the first chapter is the ending from Junky, and that is going off drugs snad hallucinates, I just thought that he has Hallucenating that whole time. Fun though.
Silvercat avatar reviewed Naked Lunch on
Helpful Score: 2
This was not a book I could get into. It was one of those books that put me in a strange and foreign place - the world of drug addiction. Though not the first book I have opened that covered this theme, I found the way the content was covered to be quite depressing - disappointing, as I had read reviews lauding this particular book.
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reviewed Naked Lunch on + 37 more book reviews
Weird Weird Weird!!!!
kel1183 avatar reviewed Naked Lunch on + 6 more book reviews
William S Burroughs is a genius. This book has kind of a plinky plunky diction with the words kind of flowing in and out of correct sentence structures. If you enjoy this you will also love Wild Boys. These stories are honest and raw, candid and chilling. The characters are so real and easy to latch onto even though I have nothing in common with them.


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