I've just seen that there is a David Cronenburg film of this book. It's the perfect pairing. The only other person who could have filmed this is perhaps John Waters, and he's maybe a bit friendly.If you've read the book and ever watched a Cronenburg film, you're eyes just bugged out and jaw dropped at the idea of it, right? If not, why not? Explain. The book is sparklingly brilliant, awful, nasty, wicked and beautiful. The work of a genius. There are a lot of good reviews out there, I'm not up t...

I made it just a little bit past the passage mentioning Steely Dan the dildo (actually, it's three generations of dildos all thriving under the Steely Dan name). And then, at the request of my old man who was sick of hearing me complain and puzzle over this book, I put it down for good. I don't like to leave books unfinished, but a girl can only swallow so many reiterations of the same tired orgiastic death-by-hanging scenario before she puts her foot down and says NO MORE! I almost liked the bo...

Glenn Russell --- Speak to us straight about your Lunch that’s bareTwisted, dirty and anything but fair.Your words like needles sticking in our veinsAs you write of dopefiends, coke bugs and dames. William S. Burroughs --- Rube, the word we use in this world is junkYou’ll hear straight without funny stuff or funk.Read the damn book; I have nothing more to addFor embellishing perfection has never been a fad.This is a one-of-a-kind novel. Couldn't help myself with the Alexander Pope-style heroic c...

This book is beautiful in a sick-grotesque-wild-hilarious-creative-mind-bending-outlandish-drug-filled-dirty-brave kind of way. If I could use one word to describe it, it would be “bizarre”; although “hilarious” and “important” could work, too. In Naked Lunch you are taken into the mind of William S. Burroughs -- a twisted, drug addicted man, who also happens to be genius. When considering its content, it’s no wonder Naked Lunch was banned and railed against when it was first released; it’s also...

I'd love to rate this one higher, but however groundbreaking it was at the time, I always felt that Burroughs went on to produce much better books. Just like Kerouac had stronger stuff than On the Road, so too did WSB in comparison to this.It still has one of the most apt titles ever. Contrary to what the small-minded prudes who brought the obscenity case against it assumed, this book has nothing to do with some lewd midday meal. "Naked Truth" might've been a better title, if it weren't such a m...

WARNING: nasty language ahead, including the use of some of my favorite phrases from the novel; these include such choice nuggets as mugwump jism and to turn a massacre into a sex orgy and a bubbly thick stagnant sound, a sound you could smell and the subject will come at his whistle, shit on the floor if he but say Open Sesame. anyway, I’ll be honest, mugwump jism, it took me a while to get into Naked Lunch, to turn a massacre into a sex orgy. Three attempts, to be exact, a bubbly thick sta...

"Agenbite of Inwit." (repeat until exhausted...)James JoyceI don't think I ever saw the point of Burroughs' title - but I have a hunch it's the same stark lunch many of our shamefully-unsung vets see on their plates when their awful PTSD kicks in - God save 'em all!Way back in 1967 I caught the Postmodern English Lit bug. I celebrated New Year by gorging my literary appetite on the short stories of Franz Kafka. I started Joyce’s Ulysses (agenbite of inwit...) after reading his autobiography of S...

Oh boy. One part of me wants to throw this novel away because some parts are written like a 15-year-old's first foray into erotic fanfiction while another part of me wants to hail this as a masterpiece of filth that would make John Waters sick. So I'm going to settle in the middle. There are some parts of this novel that made me go "what the actual fuck" but I like that. I like it when literally every boundary is pushed as far as it can go. The prose is nonsensical and disorientating which is pr...

Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs is a corrosive mash-up of Hunter S. Thompson, George Carlin and a hoarse whisper of Jim Morrison, (and the good doctor Thompson no doubt kept a volume of Burroughs on his desk between the dictionary and the thesaurus). Wake up Charles Bukowski at noon, scrape him off the floor of an Oakland flophouse, feed him, sober him cold, clean him up with a shower and shave and tailor a nice suit around him and you APPROACH the simmering rage of Burroughs, the feral, hau...

This was freakishly amazing, simultaneously making me wish I was on a full H binge with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Infinite Jest, and a whole slew of Stephen King books to cap off this horrific tome of pure poetry.1959. And still absolutely harrowing today.I thought movies like Requiem For A Dream or tv shows like The Wire were the most absolutely effective anti-drug memoir ever created by richly immersing us in the addict's life... but no. Naked Lunch tips the reader right off a cliff into...

”The title means exactly what the words say: NAKED lunch--a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of the fork.” The book title was suggested by Jack Kerouac. If not for the intervention of William S. Burroughs friends, Naked Lunch would have never seen the light of day. Peter Orlovsky, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac decided to visit Burroughs in Tangiers and see if they could salvage any of the fragmented writing that had been dripping from the mind of Burroughs while he was n...

This book is not easy to read if your idea of reading is that it has a linear plot, characters that are either good, bad or somewhere in between, spirit-uplifting narratives and dialogues and inspiring theme.This book has none of those. Yet, this is one of the best-written books that I've ever read. Reading this was just a different experience: you don't know where Burroughs would take you every time you lift the page, you don't know who would appear as the characters and what they would say or

I kind of detest Burroughs for his abuse of boys in Morocco, but his writing was influential and quite a trip to read. This particular book - one of his most famous - is a druggy trip from the US to Mexico. It is sort of On the Road but taking about 10x more mescaline and cocaine and acid than Kerouac and his friends did. If you want to get a feeling for the crazy off the rails atmosphere of the 60s, this is the book for you.

From the 20 pages I've read so far, it seems like starting a heroin habit is a bad idea.

So, basically, the meaningless drivel of the very first circuit boi? Seriously? Maybe I would have liked it better if I weren't already sick to death of all the hallucinatory narratives this book spawned. This is a structure that needed to be created only once to get the bastard over with and properly buried.Drug narratives are always only autobiographies obsessed with the author's secret obscene wishes and (inevitably) Neanderthal politics. They are the literary equivalent of a frotteur on the

A merry-go-round of grotesqueries & infinite pain. The life of the junky means nothing and so the experience is circular-- a self-(or is it?)punishment, an act of extreme nihilism--this is a cry from the very depths of hell, and the last time I checked the most successful account of it was by a man named Dante Alighieri.Burroughs out-writes those terribly true duds of literary fame, mainly Henry Miller, Kerouac, et al. This is incendiary, fantastic, simply put, a bonafide WORK OF ART. In my mind...

"Nothing is true; everything is permitted,"- Vladimir Bartol Chinese translation: 萬事皆虛 諸事可為This book is purely crazy (tons of crazy shit have gone on in this story), that's all I can tell you after I finished reading the Chinese translation (published in Taiwan). I also admit I don't think I fully understand what William S. Burroughs tried to tell us, and some parts of the story really tend to drag on and on for no good reason.The whole story reads like a series of junkie's nightmarish, incoher

The flaw of the 5-star rating system is in trying figure out whether you should award stars based on how much you liked a book, or based on how "good" you think a book is. These two criteria are often distinct from each other, and Naked Lunch, at least for me, is a perfect example of this. I think that Naked Lunch is a brilliant book, an that Burroughs is one of our century's great literary geniuses. So, that makes it a five star book. But did I enjoy reading it? Sometimes very much, sometimes n...

Ugh. I'm sure this is very brilliant and all, but it's extremely unpleasant to read. Physically repulsive, it's enough to scare anyone away from heroin, and yet, in some ways, it glorifies the experience in a self-indulgent way. Mind you, the book has no plot, and is just one drug-induced hallucination after another. It gets pretty boring after a while. Even extreme disgust gets old after about 50 pages. You're so numb after a few pages that Burrough's attempts to get nastier and nastier and sho...

What can you say about Uncle Bill that hasn't already been said? I know that there was an obscenity trial over this book back in the day, but it still amazes me that he wasn't killed by an angry mob in the streets. Remember this was published in an America that didn't allow married couples on television shows to sleep in the same bed or use the word "pregnant". The text is obviously extremely disturbing. Make no mistake, reading this book is an endurance test. If you make it through you will fee...