Clearest book of the cut-up trilogy and by far the best, although The Ticket That Exploded had its moments.The first half of the book is brilliant, then Burroughs lost me for a while there talking about galactic space courts and advocates etc. but it does become easier to understand again. This novel has fewer cut-up sentences which are hard to follow as we read the text linearly. Some of the information contained herein features in other Burroughs novels too, like the 'Clom Fliday' (slightly un...

I have viewed and the Nova Trilogy as a self contained entity and rated it as a piece of conceptual art and an occult operation. Certainly it is not the ideal place to begin an exploration of the work of William S. Burroughs. " Of language and writing, considered as magical operations, evocatory magic."Intimate Journal. Charles Baudelaire.

I'm glad Burroughs did the thing that he did. Can't exactly say it's my cup of tea. Of course. Not exactly sure it's tea. Or a cup. It's probably good stuff.new thing :: read v3 of a trilogy. first.another new thing :: this volume kicks off a new reading=series for me. Mass=Market=Maddness (mm-maddness). Which will feature me reading mass market pb's that were probably purchased cheap and whose survival as a bound thing matters not an iota to me. Nor understanding what I'm reading. Because they

UNREADABLE.

One cannot underestimate the impact of this book on the second half of the 20th century. forget "Junkey" and "Naked Lounch", this is Burroughs at his finest. it is pure heavy metal layered on industrial techno, grunge and punk steamed to perfection.

A book profoundly influenced by DMT experiences. As such, it explores barely imaginable paradoxes in the human condition which culminate in an eschaton of co-operative mutation after passing through searing Nova heat.Burroughs' final exhortation of 'Silence!' was good advice, coming as it did in the Summer of '64.

Sort of the ultimate Libertarian cranky novel (with huge experimental overtures), Burroughs is at the very least a great American Humorist in the Mark Twain category or at the very least a hard-boiled Jonathan Swift. Nevertheless you either like the 'voice' or you don't. As a younger man he was 'it' or the cat's milk, but now that I am older (and not wiser by any means) I prefer PG Wodehouse. But I will never forget my youthful appreciations for this very dark Gentleman.

One of Burroughs' best. His obsessions in this work — virus, CO2, inability to breath, aqualungs, nova crime, "rushing the life boat in drag" — are especially resonant against the backdrop of 2020. Burroughs is often regarded as an obscure, repetitive novelist, but I see him more as a 20th century sibyl. A work like Nova Express isn't a failed novel or story. It's an oracle. An occult vision of the future.One striking example:"Two Lesbian Agents with glazed faces of grafted penis flesh sat sippi...

I read Naked Lunch a few years back.. but don't really feel as if I really read it... a lot of it went over my head. So in a weird way reading this for my reading club did make me feel like I was having a kind of acid flashback to reading Naked Lunch. So in a way I was prepared but not as prepared as I thought I would be... but I loved it (in places). Hard to describe it and its the 2nd part of a trilogy, though I'm told it doesn't matter what order that trilogy is written because it deals with

I had a pretty tough time with this one, it took me a while to read it because I kept rereading bits that I didn't immediately get... but when I did get it then I really got it but my God I don't think I'll be able to explain it. Love the concepts though, and feel like just by writing this review I'm contributing to that darn Word Virus!

This is assumedly a SF book, written by William S. Burroughs. It was nominated for Nebula in 1965 and I read as a part of Monthly reads in Hugo & Nebula Awards: Best Novels group.It isn’t the third volume of the trilogy, as Goodreads suggests. For the trilogy actually doesn’t exist: it is attempt of the author to use the following technique: write a text, cut it in parts with no regard to sentence structure, rearrange and drop pieces, write a next part based on what resulted. Repeat. At the same...

This one made my scalp tingle. An exceptional experience of genre-transcendence pregnant with concepts and themes that have likely been an essential nutrient in the building of many other works by many other folks.I managed to do an audio field recording of my surroundings of the last hour or so it took for me to finish reading this book; I plan to play this publicly in various spots that I will be reading more and will likely be uploading composites of these.I'll have to come back to this revie...

Just well-written enough to be (barely) comprehensible.Burroughs was mush-mouthed as a writer and there's plenty of mush here. The thing is, there's also some pitch-black deadpan critics of the moden control systems which are getting larger and paradoxically more insidious everyday. Think of shit like Prozac, Botox, "focus groups", therapy culture, nuclear radiation, beaurocratic paranoia, "disaster capitalism", corporate hegemony, consumerism and all that abstract mind-waste which clogs up any

Probably my least favorite of the “cut-up” trilogy. I should have known when the foreword was almost as long as the novel that there was bound to be an issue with quality. And a large portion of the foreword centered around Burroughs stating Nova Express was a mainstream sci-fi novel that any 12-year-old could read. Uh...no. Nor can I imagine them wanting to. On the whole, there was a lot less “anal mucus” than the other two books, but there was furthermore a lot more missing that would’ve tied

"What scared you all into time? Into body? Into shit? I will tell you: "the word."- William S. Burroughs, Nova ExpressWriting about the Nova Trilogy is frustrating. It feels...a bit...like reviewing Joyce's Finnegans Wake. At 3:00, now 4, am it is hard to really, REALLY, get to the meat and idahosoftbones of it all. The books (all 3) are so damn knotty and naughty. Now, I'm not even REALLY comparing the Nova Trilogy to Finnegans Wake. No. They are two different beasts in scale, complexity, metho...

I have no idea how to rate this book. On the other had, I didn't really enjoy reading it. As a novel, it was pretty bad - it had no plot, no characters to speak of, no coherence.On the other hand -we want it to revolve around Nova and images - cause attempts to stop their consensus reality - Sinals were a joint project - meets media critique of Minraud - - infiltrators, they tried to experiment - crucial natural levels of violence in the arts - Only way to capture - conceptualize the limits - su...

Hands-down the best of the nova trilogy (The Soft Machine is a close second, though), and the most coherent. That being said, attaching words like "coherent" to a description of any of Burroughs' avant-garde novels is pointless distraction, ignoring how these books are meant to communicate to the reader thoughts, ideas, and visions that transcend what is and is not traditionally coherent or comprehensible to the average human when in a state free of psychedelic influence. Burroughs' language is

"Nova Express" one of the novels in the "Nova Express" trilogy. Warning: William S. Burroughs is not for everybody. He is not for children and he may be offensive to you. I do not want to mislead someone into reading something as though it were a book that anyone can benefit from reading. The thing I like about the books in the "Nova Express" trilogy are the wacky voices. "Nova Express" begins with a statement from Inspector Lee, whose job is to disrupt the work of the Venusians (inhabitants of

Sucks. Even worse than Naked Lunch.

I'm labeling this one as a "what did I just read" book. It's one where I had to do some research to discover what the author was doing, what his point was. I had my ideas (and they were mostly correct), but learning the context of this one helped. Stylistically it reminded me of Gravity's Rainbow and maybe a lot angrier Kurt Vonnegut. There are some lucid parts that are easier to understand than others. The disjointed nature of the prose is intentional.