An interview with Klaus Maeck by Christophe Becker “Ich war Prinz in diesem Land. Alle anderen mussten vor mich auf den Boden blicken, und niemand durfte mir in die Augen sehen, aber nun bin ich in Ketten, wie mein Volk. Jetzt muss ich auf den Boden schauen.” [“I was a prince in this country. Everyone…
Tag: Queer
Not Everything Is Permitted
A Review of Luca Guadagnino’s Queer by Oliver Harris Literary adaptations for the silver screen have always been a hit and miss affair, with some notable triumphs and many spectacular travesties. William Burroughs’ bête noire was The Snows of Kilimanjaro,which in 1952 ruined Hemingway’s short story about death by giving it a Hollywood happy ending….
Writing Beyond the Grave: William Burroughs and Denton Welch
By Thom Robinson Introduction On publication in 1983, The Place of Dead Roads was received as William Burroughs’ long-awaited Western, a project originally announced two decades before.1 Forming the second instalment of an emerging trilogy, the novel continued the use of genre fiction found in Cities of the Red Night (1981), with much of its…
Report on a Lecture Given by Oliver Harris, “William Burroughs and the Torso Murderer”
Part of the Hendrick’s Lecture Series, organised by The Last Tuesday Society, 19th November 2010 by Rona Cran Viktor Wynd’s Little Shop of Horrors, situated unassumingly on Mare Street in Hackney, is a beguiling emporium of which William S. Burroughs would no doubt have approved. There are shrunken heads on sale, and sinister bibelots (a…
Oliver Harris Interviewed on Queer
A Few Questions and Answers with the Editor of the New Edition of William S. Burroughs’ Queer Though the first published edition of Queer was assembled from a mix of manuscript sources, it was done with the collaboration and blessing of the author. In crafting this new edition, which is a sort of remix of…
Confusion’s Masterpiece
Re-Editing William S. Burroughs’ First Trilogy By Oliver Harris This is the written version of a talk given by Professor Harris at Columbia University on 16 September 2010. See also Oliver Harris Interviewed on Queer. In 1943, when Allen Ginsberg was a 17-year-old Columbia freshman and first met William Burroughs, he was impressed by Burroughs’…
Everything Lost, the Latin American Notebook of William S. Burroughs: The Inside Story
By Volume Editor, Oliver Harris Background: The Crying of Lot 22 Where it had been since 1953 and how it got into the hands of a private collector remain a mystery, but it surfaced in October 1999 as Lot 22 of Sotheby’s “Allen Ginsberg and Friends” sale in New York. The small, black notebook with…
Cutting up the Archive: William Burroughs and the Composite Text
by Oliver Harris This is an edited version of a paper delivered to the 4th Annual Symposium on Textual Studies at the Centre for Textual Scholarship, De Montfort University, Leicester, 25 May 2007. I’d like to start by saying how delighted I am to have been invited here today by Peter Shillingsburg and how honoured…
Junky, Queer, Naked Lunch
New York: Quality Paperbook Book Club 1995, three novels in one volume available only to book club members, bound in pictorial wraps. This bibliography of A-List publications by William S. Burroughs derives from Eric C. Shoaf’s Collecting William S. Burroughs in Print: A Checklist and is published online courtesy of the author, who retains all…
Queer
New York: Viking 1985, first US printing, hardbound in dust jacket. An early autobiographical manuscript published some thirty years after being written. _____ Uncorrected Galley Proof in wraps including a dust jacket with a different design from the final issue. London: Picador 1985, first British printing, hardbound in dust jacket, rather scarce for a trade…
Introduction from Queer
William S. Burroughs When I lived in Mexico City at the end of the 1940s, it was a city of one million people, with clear sparkling air and the sky that special shade of blue that goes so well with circling vultures, blood and sand–the raw menacing pitiless Mexican blue. I liked Mexico City from…