Showing results by author "William S" in All Categories

Embark on an extraordinary voyage through six captivating worlds of folklore and myth. Across more than one hundred and ten hours of immersive storytelling, you’ll witness common threads of wonder that unite us all—no matter how far apart our cultures may be.

Set in Mexico City during the early 50s, Queer follows William Lee's hopeless pursuit of desire from bar to bar in the American expatriate scene. As Lee breaks down, the trademark Burroughsian voice emerges; a maniacal mix of self-lacerating humor and the Ugly American at his ugliest. Burroughs' only realist love story, Queer is a haunting tale of possession and exorcism.

From one of the founders of the beat generation and the 1960s counterculture comes this opening novel of a series available now in audio for the first time. An opium addict is lost in the jungle; young men wage war against an empire of mutants; a handsome young pirate faces his execution; and the world's population is infected with a radioactive epidemic. These stories are woven together in a single tale of mayhem and chaos.

Burroughs’ first novel, a largely autobiographical account of the constant cycle of drug dependency, cures, and relapses, remains the most unflinching, unsentimental account of addiction ever written. Through time spent kicking and time spent dealing, through junk sickness and a sanatorium, Junky is a field report from the American postwar drug underground. A cult classic, it has influenced generations of writers with its raw, sparse, and unapologetic tone.

In The Soft Machine, William S. Burroughs begins an adventure that will take us into the dark recesses of his imagination, a region where nothing is sacred, nothing taboo. Continuing his ferocious verbal assault on hatred, hype, poverty, war, bureaucracy, and addiction in all its forms, Burroughs gives us a surreal space odyssey through the wounded galaxies in a book only he could create.

Eighteen of the very best American short stories, each a classic in its own right. Stories include "The Little Frenchman and his Water Lots", by George Pope Morris; "The Angel of the Odd", by Edgar Allan Poe; "The Schoolmasters’s Progress", by Caroline M.S. Kirkland; "The Watkinson Evening", by Eliza Leslie; "Titbottom’s Spectacles", by George William Curtis; "My Double and "How He Undid Me", by Edward Everett Hale; "A Visit to the Asylum for Aged and Decayed Punsters", by Oliver Wendell; and more.

Naked Lunch is one of the most important novels of the 20th century, a book that redefined not just literature but American culture. An unnerving tale of a narcotics addict unmoored in New York, Tangiers, and, ultimately, a nightmarish wasteland known as Interzone.

Eli wasn’t supposed to make it this far...yet here he is. Redundantly, exiled by force (after he already decided to leave) by those who wanted him gone anyway, he’s now stuck crossing the deadly lightning plains. Divine wizards want him dead, bounty hunters are closing in, and every day monsters see the caravan as a slowly moving target. If he can’t grind harder, level faster, figure out what he can do, and grow stronger, he won’t just not make it to their new home—he and his family and friends might just die.

William Burroughs closed his classic novel Junky by saying he had determined to search out a drug he called ‘Yage’, a drug that could be ‘the final fix’. In The Yage Letters, a mix of travel writing, satire, psychedelia, and epistolary novel, he journeys through South America, writing to his friend Allen Ginsberg about his experiments with the strange drug, using it to travel through time and space and derange his senses.

Burroughs’ letters reveal his desire to escape the norms of American society which hemmed him in, and the extraordinary steps he took to break free.

More than 60 years ago, William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, two novice writers at the dawn of their careers, sat down to write a novel about the summer of 1944, when one of their friends killed another in a moment of brutal and tragic bloodshed. Alternating chapters, they pieced together a hard-boiled tale of bohemian New York during World War II, full of drugs and obsession, art and violence.

In this funny, nightmarish masterpiece of imaginative excess, grotesque characters engage in acts of violent one-upmanship, boundless riches mangle a corner of Africa into a Bacchanalian utopia, and technology, flesh, and violence fuse with and undo each other. A fragmentary, freewheeling novel, it sees wild boys engage in vigorous, ritualistic sex and drug taking, as well as prankster-ish guerrilla warfare and open combat with a confused and outmatched army.

This surreal fable, set in America's Old West, features a cast of notorious characters: the Crying Gun, who breaks into tears at the sight of his opponent; the Priest, who goes into gunfights giving his adversaries the last rites; and the Nihilistic Kid himself, Kim Carsons, a homosexual gunslinger who, with a succession of beautiful sidekicks, sets out to challenge the morality of small-town America and fight for intergalactic freedom.

Join the world's top medical doctors, naturopathic doctors, dietitians, nutritionists, scientists, researchers and authors who will share with you the unbiased, accurate, scientifically proven truth about health, nutrition, the food system, the medical system and the environment - Visit Us at TheRealTruthAboutHealth.com Disclaimer: Medical and Health information changes constantly. Therefore, the information provided in this podcast should not be considered current, complete, or exhaustive. Reliance on any information provided in this podcast is solely at your own risk. The Real Truth About ...

At daybreak on April 6, 1862, Confederate forces launched a bold suprise attack on the Union army, encamped in southwestern Tennesse. The battle of Shiloh, also known as the battle of Pittsburg Landing, would prove to be the bloodiest battle up until that point in United Staes history. The two day battle would cost a staggering 23,000 casualties. Both sides were stunned at the appalling loss of life. At the time, neither realized that three more years of such bloodshed were still to come.

Fourteen outstanding authors. Fourteen worlds that never were. Throughout the human experience, historians have wondered, “What if?” What if Japan had been on the side of the U.S. in World War II? What if things had been just a little different in the Falklands? What if Russia had started World War Three?

Does it take faith to be a Jedi? Are droids capable of thought? Should Jar Jar Binks be held responsible for the rise of the Empire? Presenting entirely new essays, no aspect of the myth and magic of George Lucas's creation is left philosophically unexamined in The Ultimate Star Wars and Philosophy. 

A fascinating mix of autobiographical episodes and extraordinary Egyptian theology, Burroughs' final novel is poignant and melancholic. Blending war films and pornography, and referencing Kafka and Mailer, The Western Lands confirms Burroughs' status as one of America's greatest writers. The final novel of the trilogy begun with Cities of the Red Night and The Place of Dead Roads is a Book of the Dead for the nuclear age, an astonishing, profound, and revealing meditation on morality, loneliness, life, and death.

After more than 20 years in special operations, USMC Gunnery Sergeant Wolf Mathison wasn’t looking forward to retirement when—implanted with an experimental artificial intelligence—he deployed on his last mission with a platoon of Marine Raiders being sent to the Jovian moon Europa. The USS Jefferson was destroyed en route, though, and only Mathison and three other marines survived. Trapped in stasis, they were hurled into the outer reaches of the solar system, where they wouldn’t be found for hundreds of years.

Dive into the moral philosophy at the heart of all four seasons of NBC's The Good Place, guided by academic experts, including the show's philosophical consultants Pamela Hieronymi and Todd May, and featuring a foreword from creator and showrunner Michael Schur. 

Prime Minister Mathison must consolidate power and bind the Governance to his will if he is to save the human race. And for that to happen, Stathis will have to become the spearhead of his efforts, because the vanhat will not give up, and they are not the only threat. Becket must also be dealt with, or he may destroy the Governance from within. But is Stathis ready to be the spearhead? He’d better be, for there is no one else Mathison can turn to, and the need is greater than they know.