by Dave Teeuwen The first book of criticism of any sort that I came into contact with was Jennie Skerl’s William S. Burroughs, part of Twayne’s author series, designed to introduce different American authors of consequence to a wider public. It sat on the shelf at the library next to other books that weren’t Naked…
Tag: Dave Teeuwen
Davis Schneiderman Interview on The Third Mind
By Dave Teeuwen Though William Burroughs died in 1997, a steady stream of work taken from his archives has been published on what seems like an almost yearly basis. This is due to various scholars around the world digging into the available work to “look beneath the hood” on many of Burroughs’ texts to see…
Interview with George Mattingly
By Dave Teeuwen Anyone who has collected Burroughs’ novels eventually finds Port of Saints, the 1971 novel which operated as a kind of sequel to The Wild Boys, although it was not published until 1980 in a widely read edition put out by Blue Wind Press. Your eyes run along the bookshelf and it stands…
Interview with Victor Bockris on William Burroughs
By Dave Teeuwen Why did you write a book about Burroughs? He’s not nearly as glamorous or popular as most of your other subjects, or was he? At the time I started to write the book, January 1979, William Burroughs was one of the most glamorous and hip people in New York. We were deep…
The Soft Machines
By Dave Teeuwen William Burroughs had the unusual habit of rewriting and rereleasing his novels during the 1960s and 1970s. He is not the only author to have undertaken a revision of a previously published work. Henry James famously revised and added to his novels in the early years of the 20th century for the…
William S. Burroughs’ “Abstracts”
The “Abstracts” As an Attempt to Write the Immediate Image By Dave Teeuwen The “Abstracts” of 1969 are a series of seven writing experiments which William Burroughs developed in the writing of his novel The Wild Boys. He published these “Abstracts” that year in small-press journals and underground newspapers, his usual testing ground in the…
Abstract (Lip 1969)
A Text by William S. Burroughs With an Introduction by Dave Teeuwen In 1969 William Burroughs published seven short pieces titled “Abstract” and sent them out to various small-press literary magazines and underground newspapers. Throughout the 1960s Burroughs was extremely active with the alternative press. Bibliographies of his work show that he was published hundreds…