RealityStudio

RealityStudio is the web’s leading resource dedicated to William S. Burroughs and the underground press in the 1960s.

William S. Burroughs with a copy of Naked Lunch at the Beat Hotel, 1959

What’s New

RealityStudio is sad to report the passing of Jürgen Ploog on 19 May 2020. We had the honor to publish his cut-up novel Flesh Film here on the site before it was put out in a handsome print edition by Moloko. Ploog, 85 years old, died peacefully in Frankfurt in the company of his family. Jan Herman, his collaborator (with William Burroughs and Carl Weissner) on Cut Up or Shut Up, has posted a memorial over at Arts Journal.

Professor Rob Johnson, author of The Lost Years of William S. Burroughs: Beats in South Texas and other works, contributes two texts. The first, “A Note on ‘The Great Peters’ in Burroughs’ Word,” explores a historical source for the hanging trope in Burroughs’ work. The second, “Old Arch,” is the last story completed by William S. Burroughs. It is reproduced from The Beatest State In The Union: An Anthology of Beat Texas Writings with the kind permission of James Grauerholz and the William S. Burroughs Estate.

Thomas Antonic contributes “The White Russian Countess: On Ilse Herzfeld Klapper and Her Marriage to William Burroughs,” an excerpt from his forthcoming book Amongst Nazis: William S. Burroughs in Vienna 1936/37 (Moloko Print, spring 2020)

Registration for the Paris and London installments of CUT-UPS@60 is now open! Head over to the official conference page at the European Beat Studies Network to register or to check out the schedule, which includes an exciting range of speakers and performers. CUT-UPS@60 is a conference to be held in London and Paris, September 2020, honoring the 60th anniversary of the invention of the cut-up technique.

Christophe Becker offers an interview with Klaus Maeck, the creator of the films Decoder and William S. Burroughs: Commissioner of Sewers.

Eric Shoaf presents an epic interview with Richard Aaron of Am Here Books. And unfortunately RealityStudio notes the passing of Eric Shoaf too.

The most recent installments of Jed’s Find of the Week series:

RealityStudio is proud to make Michael Stevens’ The Road to Interzone: Reading William S. Burroughs Reading available as a free PDF download. Road to Interzone, a bibliography of Burroughs’ reading, is one of the indispensable reference works on the author.

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