A Never-Before-Published Cut-Up Masterpiece BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS is the most important new publication by William S. Burroughs not only since the writer’s death in 1997 but quite possibly since The Third Mind made it into print in 1978. Burroughs wrote a number of books in the final decades of his life. His estate, under the leadership…
Tag: Editor
Secrets of the Olympia Press Naked Lunch
I bought my first copy of the Olympia Press edition of William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch from eBay. I had no idea what I was doing. I had never seen a copy in person. I knew little about the principles of collecting. But I had the money and the itch so I overpaid for a copy…
Michael Goodman Interview
A Conversation with the Author of Contemporary Literary Censorship: The Case History of Burroughs’ Naked Lunch I tend not to read academic work on William S. Burroughs, though there are exceptions. Oliver Harris never fails to be as insightful as he is eloquent. Recently I also enjoyed Véronique Lane’s book on the relationship between French…
The Revised Boy Scout Manual
A Review of “The Revised Boy Scout Manual”: An Electronic Revolution, edited by Geoffrey D. Smith and John M. Bennett, forthcoming from the Ohio State University Press. “Lost Masterpiece Rediscovered” claims the blurb on the cover of William S. Burroughs’ “The Revised Boy Scout Manual”: An Electronic Revolution. Without criticizing the marketing team too much,…
William S. Burroughs and J.G. Ballard
An In-Depth Account Drawing on Interviews, Correspondence, and Unpublished Documents “I got a Christmas card from Burroughs,” J.G. Ballard told an interviewer in 1986.1 It should not have been much of a surprise: he had known William S. Burroughs for about twenty years; he had recently published an enthusiastic review of Burroughs’ essay collection, The…
William S. Burroughs, Jacques Stern, and The Fluke
An Archive of Materials by and about Jacques Stern Including the Complete Text of The Fluke William S. Burroughs had known Jacques Loup Stern for little more than a year when he declared the man a “great writer.” Writing from the Beat Hotel in Paris on June 8, 1959, Burroughs reported to Allen Ginsberg that…
Jacques Stern
An Archive of Materials by and about Jacques Stern Including the Complete Text of The Fluke In the summer of 1959, with Olympia Press about to publish the first edition of Naked Lunch in Paris, William Burroughs was raving about the work of another writer. Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso — they all paled,…
Death in Paris
A New Book-Length Text by Carl Weissner And an Archive Celebrating Weissner’s Publications in the Avant-Garde Introduction After going to see the Villa Seurat, where Henry Miller lived when he wrote Tropic of Cancer, we stopped at the Café Zeyer for drinks. The Zeyer, which he described as “a gaudy place with red plush and…
William S. Burroughs and Joy Division
Recently the writer Jon Savage published a thoughtful essay about the literary influences of Ian Curtis, lead singer of the seminal post-punk band Joy Division. Having followed the band from its inception, Savage is in a unique position to offer insights. He notes that “Ian Curtis was an avid reader who became a driven writer,”…
David Britton and Michael Butterworth on William S. Burroughs
David Britton and Michael Butterworth are the founders of Savoy Books. To call Savoy a publishing house is rather like calling Charles Manson a criminal — it’s correct but it fails to account for so much more. A frequent contributor to New Worlds magazine, Butterworth established himself at a young age as an important figure…
Interview with Malcolm Mc Neill
Artist Speaks about Collaborating with Burroughs on Ah Pook Is Here In 1970 Malcolm Mc Neill received a phone call from a man who asked to meet “the guy who knows how to draw me.” The caller was William S. Burroughs. Mc Neill had recently illustrated a Burroughs text called “The Unspeakable Mr. Hart” for the underground…
Henry Miller and William Burroughs: An Overview
Also see Ian MacFadyen’s insightful response to RealityStudio’s overview: Henry Miller and William Burroughs: A Letter. After finishing with the summer job his father had negotiated for him at the St. Louis Post Dispatch, William S. Burroughs returned to Harvard in September 1935. It was his senior year. An English major, Burroughs had studied with…
William S. Burroughs and Kurt Cobain: A Dossier
In honor of what would have been Kurt Cobain’s 40th birthday on 20 February 2007, RealityStudio offers this dossier documenting the relationship between Cobain and William S. Burroughs. Cobain greatly admired Burroughs, instigating their collaboration on The “Priest” They Called Him and visiting the Beat legend at his home in Lawrence, Kansas. And while Burroughs…
Interview with Gary Lee-Nova
Reading Burroughs Since the Beginning Gary Lee-Nova is a Vancouver-based artist known especially as an important figure in the “West Coast Scene” of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Sometimes working under the pseudonym Art Rat, Lee-Nova has produced a sizable body of work ranging from film to painting, from cut-ups to mail art. Alongside…
Transitional Period vs Gongs of Violence
Two Burroughs Cut-Ups Compared A few months ago Professor Oliver Harris was kind enough to share with RealityStudio one of his working documents for Yage Redux. It is an incredible Microsoft Word palimpsest comparing Burroughs’ various yage publications and manuscripts. RealityStudio couldn’t publish it (for obvious copyright reasons), but we did add a few images…
Yage Letters Redux
RealityStudio Reviews the New Edition Prepared by Oliver Harris It is an acknowledged paradox at the heart of William S. Burroughs’ work that his greatest books called into question how much they were even his. Whereas Samuel Beckett tried to eviscerate the novel from within — to “naughten” it, to borrow a term from Heidegger…
The Lost Years of William S. Burroughs
RealityStudio Reviews the New Book by Rob Johnson Rob Johnson, The Lost Years of William S. Burroughs: Beats in South Texas, published by Texas A&M University Press, May 2006. Available now from Amazon. “‘SHOOT THE BITCH AND WRITE A BOOK! THAT’S WHAT I DID,’ William Burroughs suddenly shouted, standing up fast.” The bitch was Joan…
The Junky’s Christmas
Review of Koch Vision’s New DVD It is always difficult to establish objective criteria for determining the literary worth of a book, but one possibility would be to consider its filmability. Is it easy to transpose a given book into film? If so, it implies that the qualities that might distinguish the book as a…
Evil River
A Burroughs Memoir? Evil River If you search for William Burroughs’ name on Amazon.com, you’ll discover a book that is supposed to come out in July, 2005 called Evil River. What exactly is this? In Word Virus, an editor mentions that a “memoir begun by Burroughs, which he called Evil River (from the St. John…
What Happened to Cursed from Birth?
In 2002 Grove Press was supposed to publish a new book called Cursed from Birth: The Short, Unhappy Life of William S. Burroughs, Jr. The book was to be a selection of autobiographical writings culled by David Ohle from unpublished works by the son of the famous Beat author. However, after appearing on publisher lists,…
Interview with Rob Johnson
Author of The Lost Years of William S. Burroughs: Beats in South Texas Rob Johnson is a professor of English and American literature at the University of Texas Pan-American — which, it turns out, is just down the road a bit from Pharr, Texas, where William S. Burroughs lived in the late 1940s. (Google map)…
Interview with John Geiger
Author of Books on Brion Gysin and the Dream Machine John Geiger is the author of four books. His first two concerned Arctic exploration. His next two, Chapel of Extreme Experience: A Short History of Stroboscopic Light and The Dream Machine and Nothing Is True – Everything Is Permitted: The Life of Brion Gysin, concerned…
Interview with Hank O’Neal
Photographer Speaks about Burroughs Hank O’Neal is a photographer well known for his jazz and portrait photography. He collaborated with Berenice Abbott for many years, and also befriended many of the writers of the Beat generation. His portraits of William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and others can be seen on his web site. Abrams/Image will…
Interview with Professor Oliver Harris
Burroughs Scholar Speaks of Past and Forthcoming Publications Aside from James Grauerholz, executor of the Burroughs Estate, Oliver Harris may well be the most eminent living scholar of William Burroughs and his works. Senior Lecturer in the Department of American Studies at Keele University in England, Harris first made himself known to admirers of Burroughs…