Free Ebook Junky: The Definitive Text of "Junk", by William S. Burroughs
Also the price of an e-book Junky: The Definitive Text Of "Junk", By William S. Burroughs is so economical; many individuals are really stingy to set aside their cash to buy guides. The other reasons are that they really feel bad as well as have no time at all to go to the book shop to search guide Junky: The Definitive Text Of "Junk", By William S. Burroughs to read. Well, this is contemporary period; a lot of publications could be got quickly. As this Junky: The Definitive Text Of "Junk", By William S. Burroughs and also more e-books, they can be entered quite quick means. You will not should go outside to obtain this book Junky: The Definitive Text Of "Junk", By William S. Burroughs
Junky: The Definitive Text of "Junk", by William S. Burroughs
Free Ebook Junky: The Definitive Text of "Junk", by William S. Burroughs
Junky: The Definitive Text Of "Junk", By William S. Burroughs. Reading makes you much better. Which says? Several sensible words say that by reading, your life will be better. Do you think it? Yeah, show it. If you need guide Junky: The Definitive Text Of "Junk", By William S. Burroughs to read to prove the wise words, you could see this web page flawlessly. This is the website that will certainly provide all the books that possibly you require. Are the book's collections that will make you really feel interested to check out? One of them below is the Junky: The Definitive Text Of "Junk", By William S. Burroughs that we will propose.
Surely, to improve your life top quality, every publication Junky: The Definitive Text Of "Junk", By William S. Burroughs will have their specific session. However, having specific awareness will certainly make you feel much more positive. When you really feel something occur to your life, often, reading publication Junky: The Definitive Text Of "Junk", By William S. Burroughs could help you to make calmness. Is that your genuine hobby? Occasionally of course, but often will certainly be not certain. Your selection to check out Junky: The Definitive Text Of "Junk", By William S. Burroughs as one of your reading e-books, can be your proper e-book to read now.
This is not about exactly how a lot this e-book Junky: The Definitive Text Of "Junk", By William S. Burroughs costs; it is not likewise regarding exactly what kind of book you truly like to review. It has to do with what you can take and also obtain from reading this Junky: The Definitive Text Of "Junk", By William S. Burroughs You can like to decide on other publication; however, it does not matter if you attempt to make this e-book Junky: The Definitive Text Of "Junk", By William S. Burroughs as your reading selection. You will not regret it. This soft documents publication Junky: The Definitive Text Of "Junk", By William S. Burroughs could be your buddy all the same.
By downloading this soft file book Junky: The Definitive Text Of "Junk", By William S. Burroughs in the online link download, you remain in the primary step right to do. This site really supplies you convenience of exactly how to get the most effective publication, from best vendor to the brand-new launched book. You can find much more publications in this site by seeing every link that we provide. One of the collections, Junky: The Definitive Text Of "Junk", By William S. Burroughs is among the finest collections to market. So, the first you obtain it, the very first you will certainly obtain all favorable concerning this book Junky: The Definitive Text Of "Junk", By William S. Burroughs
Junk is not, like alcohol or a weed, a means to increased enjoyment of life. Junk is not a kick. It is a way of life.
In his debut novel, Junky, Burroughs fictionalized his experiences using and peddling heroin and other drugs in the 1950s into a work that reads like a field report from the underworld of post-war America. The Burroughs-like protagonist of the novel, Bill Lee, see-saws between periods of addiction and rehab, using a panoply of substances including heroin, cocaine, marijuana, paregoric (a weak tincture of opium) and goof balls (barbiturate), amongst others. For this definitive edition, renowned Burroughs scholar Oliver Harris has gone back to archival typescripts to re-created the author's original text word by word. From the tenements of New York to the queer bars of New Orleans, Junky takes the reader into a world at once long-forgotten and still with us today. Burroughs’s first novel is a cult classic and a critical part of his oeuvre.
- Sales Rank: #144244 in eBooks
- Published on: 2012-10-02
- Released on: 2012-10-02
- Format: Kindle eBook
Review
"Reads today as fresh and unvarnished as it ever has."-Will Self on Junky
“Of all the Beat Generation writers, William S. Burroughs was the most dangerous. . . . He was anarchy’s double agent, an implacable enemy of conformity and of all agencies of control-from government to opiates.”—Rolling Stone
“The most important writer to emerge since World War II. . . . For his sheer visionary power, and for his humor, I admire Burroughs more than any living writer, and most of those who are dead.”—J.G. Ballard
“William was a Shootist. He shot like he wrote—with extreme precision and no fear.”—Hunter S. Thompson
“A book of great beauty . . . . Burroughs is the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius.” —Norman Mailer
“Ever since Naked Lunch . . . Burroughs has been ordained America’s most incendiary artist.”—Los Angeles Times
“Burroughs voice is hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American.”—Joan Didion
“In 1953, at the height of American conformism and anti-communist hysteria, William S. Burroughs published Junky, an irresistible strung-out ode to the joys and perversities of drug addiction. . . . Junky eschews allegory for scrupulous realism. . . . More than anything else, Junky reads like a field guide to the American underworld.”—The Daily Beast
“Retro-cool, like something Don Draper might find in the Greenwich Village pad of that reefer-smoking painter he was seeing in the first season of Mad Men.”—Las Vegas Weekly on Naked Lunch
“A creator of grim fairy tales for adults, Burroughs spoke to our nightmare fears and, still worse, to our nightmare longings. . . . And more than any other postwar wordsmith, he bridged generations; popularity in the youth culture is greater now than during the heady days of the Beats.”—The Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Burroughs seems to revel in a new medium . . . a medium totally fantastic, spaceless, timeless, in which the normal sentence is fractured, the cosmic tries to push its way through the bawdry, and the author shakes the reader as a dog shakes a rat.”—Anthony Burgess on The Ticket That Exploded
“In Burroughs’ hands, writing reverts to acts of magic, as though he were making some enormous infernal encyclopedia of all the black impulses and acts that, once made, would shut the fiends away forever.”—The New York Times on The Ticket That Exploded
“Macabre, funny, reverberant, grotesque.”—The New York Review of Books on Nova Express
“Hypnotic; I wish I could quote, but it takes several pages to get high on this stuff. . . . Funny . . . outrageous along the lines of Burroughs’s well-established scatology. He can think of the wildest parodies of erotic exuberance and invent the weirdest places for demonstrating them.”—Harper’s Magazine on Nova Express
“One of the most interesting pieces of radical fiction we have.”—The Nation on The Soft Machine
“In Burroughs’ hands, writing reverts to acts of magic, as though he were making some enormous infernal encyclopedia of all the black impulses and acts that, once made, would shut the fiends away forever.”—The New York Times on The Wild Boys
About the Author
William S. Burroughs was born in St. Louis in 1914. He is best-known work is 1959's "Naked Lunch"-which became the focus of a landmark 1962 Supreme Court decision that helped eliminate literary censorship in the United States. Described by Norman Mailer as one of America's few writers genuinely "possessed by genius," he died in 1997. His many other works include "Junky" and "The Place of Dead Roads" (Picador).
Oliver Harris has an MA in creative writing from the University of East Anglia, in addition to degrees in English and Shakespeare studies, and recently received his PhD. His first novel, The Hollow Man, launched the Detective Nick Belsey series. He also reviews for the Times Literary Supplement. He lives in London.
Most helpful customer reviews
138 of 146 people found the following review helpful.
What you see is what you get...
By C. Middleton
Most serious readers have experienced a Beat phase in their reading careers...or should. Mine mainly centred on the works of Kerouac and Ginsberg with a spat of McClure and Burroughs thrown in for good measure. Through the years ~Junky~ would make an appearance, however the opportunity never presented itself to crack its covers. The book would manfest from time to time, simply to remind me that it still existed. I finally read ~Junky~ last week and it blew me away.
Despite the fact that William S. Burroughs has been thrown into the Beat literati, ~Junky~ doesn't seem to fit. The book is a one off, an important artefact of history - a testimony to an unfortunate human predicament and a way of life that is all too real; and societies ignorance, intolerance and exploitation of the condition, and its continued hypocrisy.
What I found interesting is that nothing has really changed since ~Junky~ was first published two generations ago. Drug addiction is still a 'moral issue' for a lot of people, including the addiction to alcohol. To be fair, as a society, we've probably made a little progress in the last fifty years, in terms of our understanding and treatment of drugs, but there is still a long way to go.
William Lee, a middle class, educated individual of relative privilege, tells the story of his introduction to junk, subsequent addiction and his on-going hellish relationship with the demon. This testimony is not a posing, romantic portrayal of a hip drug user, living an artistic, bohemian existence amongst poets, painters and musicians, all creating great works of art and having a wonderful time. ~Junky~ is an honest account concerning the 'vicious circle' of addiction, and the many attempts by those afflicted to escape the circle, but once you're in it, there's really no getting out - entirely.
In fact it was Burroughs who coined the phrase:
"Once a junky always a junky." And this is the tragedy.
After closing the book, I had a eerie feeling that I was holding something important in my hands. It ceased to be merely a book and became something else...a relic of a bygone era, its peculiar venacular, attitudes, dreams and nightmares. I believe it would be a mistake to include this book in any literary category for it stands alone, without pretence or device...because with ~Junky~ what you see is what you get.
85 of 88 people found the following review helpful.
Junky: a commonly misinterpreted work of brilliance
By A Customer
Junky is the kind of novel that you cannot read until you abandon all pretenses. Forget for a moment that this was Burroughs' first book, put aside the fact that he was himself a junky, and put your personal opinions of drug use and abuse, as well as Burroughs himself, on hold. The attempt made by Junky as a piece of art is to honestly and fairly put forward an in-depth look at a side of American life that was virtually overlooked until its publication. The novel delves very deeply into a world that, though many would rather ignore it all together, has gotten progressively worse to this day.
Junky offers a detailed account of a drug addict's entrance into the seedy underworld, his daily search for a fix, the shady characters he must rely on, and the suffering he experiences while trying to fix himself. The purpose is to fully immerse the reader in the world of a man engulfed in addiction.
The hero is actually an intelligent man, who immediately recognizes the risk taken in his experiments with narcotics. He also realizes, although a little too late, the fact that he has become an addict himself, and now needs the drug for basic survival. He is also rational. He recognizes his dismal circumstances, but also recognizes his guilt in the matter, and in no way tries to gain sympathy from the reader. The hero is aware of what he has done to himself, and does nothing to deny his responsibility.
Junky in no way glamorizes drug use; on the contrary, in the sections that describe heroin as appealing, Burroughs is showing the immeasurable control the drug has quietly acquired over the user, distorting the addict's perception of what is happening to him.
Junky pulls the reader into a dark underworld of society and depicts a man's struggle to regain his life, or what's left of it after the plague of addiction is eliminated. Burroughs holds nothing back. He uses a method of detailing the more shocking parts of the hero's experiences with a calm and almost casual frankness. This slowly makes them seem less disturbing, and introduces the reader more and more to the addicts point of view. Burroughs even attempts to alter the reader's point of view, subtly bringing the reader closer to the mind of the junky, and eventually creating an unexpected affection for a seemingly unlovable character, who appears to have very little about him that is redeeming. You begin to care for this lost, pathetic man, as you watch him attempt cure after cure, method after method, finally having to flee the country to avoid prosecution. The reader can do nothing but look on, as each good intention crumbles, making the hero more and more incapable of escaping the grip of the addiction.
Burroughs states many times the degree of influence heroin has over the addict, illustrating how all other activities become less like life and more like a limbo of nothingness between scores. The junky's life is consumed. His days become more and more about scoring, leaving less and less room for anything else. By the time the hero becomes aware of having a problem, it is too late, he has become a slave to the drug. He doesn't need the heroin to simply get high; he needs the heroin because he cannot survive without it. Burroughs states the difference between other drugs, which are about the high they induce, and heroin: "Junk is not a kick. It is a way of life."
There are no hidden intentions in Junky. It does not aspire to create a greater sympathy for drug addicts, nor does it make any gallant attempts at scaring away potential users. Junky has no agenda, good or bad, for its influence in the world. It simply lays out the facts, leaving them for the reader to do what they want with them. The novel is a clear, concise, and direct journey into the mind and world of a man diseased, told in brutally honest narration, without a hint of shame or pity.
This is, in my opinion, a worthy piece of literature to invest the time into reading, not only for a Burroughs fan, but for any reader who enjoys thought-provoking subject-matter and stories containing complex and intriguing characters. Basically, anyone who appreciates well-written fiction has the ability to appreciate the dark, subtle wit and stark, desperate tone of Junky, as long as they read it with an open mind. It is a chronicle, a picture, a record of a dark way of life. And as that, it succeeds.
49 of 53 people found the following review helpful.
Classic of the underground
By Jeffrey Ellis
Burroughs' first book is an autobiographical tale of how he first came to try heroin and his travels across North America as, to paraphrase the author, junk became his life. To those who know Burroughs as only the writer of Naked Lunch, the straight-forward and precise prose of Junky may come as a surprise at first but, upon careful reading, all the same concerns and motifs are here. Basically, Junky tells what was happening in the real world while Burroughs was hallucinating the junk-fueled world of Naked Lunch. While it may deceptively appear to have no real structure, its meandering style instead perfectly embodies the drug-fueled lifestyle of its protaganist. Its a fascinating read that reveals that, despite beliefs to the contrary, there has always been a drug underground in the United States where junkies remain easy scapegoats for other societal problems. While Burroughs does't condemn drug use, he can hardly be accused of promoting it either. Instead, in the best libertarian tradition, he promotes only the freedom of the individual to be able to determine his own fate.
However, beyond any possible political or philosophical interpretations, this is a fast-moving, informative book with a dry wit hidden amongst the deadpan prose. What is often forgotten is that Burroughs' first known stories were all parodies of other genres and in many ways, Junky is a dead-on imitation of the hardboiled, pulp novels that were also prominent at the time.
Junky: The Definitive Text of "Junk", by William S. Burroughs PDF
Junky: The Definitive Text of "Junk", by William S. Burroughs EPub
Junky: The Definitive Text of "Junk", by William S. Burroughs Doc
Junky: The Definitive Text of "Junk", by William S. Burroughs iBooks
Junky: The Definitive Text of "Junk", by William S. Burroughs rtf
Junky: The Definitive Text of "Junk", by William S. Burroughs Mobipocket
Junky: The Definitive Text of "Junk", by William S. Burroughs Kindle
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar