Junky
The Definitive Text of "Junk"
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Junky
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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 listener 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.
©1953 A. A. Wyn, Inc. © 1977, 1981 by William S. Burroughs. © 2003 by the Estate of William S. Burroughs. Introduction the the 1977 edition © by the Estate of Allen Ginsberg. Introduction © 2003 by Oliver Harris (P)2026 Blackstone PublishingCritic reviews
“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)“William was a Shootist. He shot like he wrote—with extreme precision and no fear.”
(Hunter S. Thompson)“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)“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)