SOURCE: "Dispatches from the Interzone," in The New York Times Book Review, January 15, 1995, pp. 9, 11.

[In the following review, Cohen detects an "autumnal, elegiac" tone in the imagery of My Education.]

William S. Burroughs is now 80. Is this a shock? Certainly his skeletal, impassive, thin-lipped mask of a face—sort of a cerebralized Buster Keaton—has always looked old. At the same time Mr. Burroughs's iconic stature among the young, for whom he is arguably the most influential American prose writer of the last 40 years, remains undiminished. The heavy metal traces of his singular vocabulary can be seen glowing darkly at the edges of our cultural landscape: In Thomas Pynchon, Hunter S. Thompson, J. G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick and countless other writers; in avant-garde music, painting and film; and in all the successive new waves of Beats, hippies and punks (what Newt Gingrich—a Burroughsian construct if ever...