SOURCE: "Dream Control," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, June 18, 1995, p. 15.

[In the following review, Weissman assesses the dream-like aspects of My Education.]

William Burroughs has the greatest speaking voice I've ever heard in my life. A gravelly deadpan, direct from the chest cavity. Think of a goat with a large vocabulary. Burroughs was and is the wild alternative to his spiritual, stream-of-confessional beat brothers of the 1950s and '60s. With the publication of Junky and Naked Lunch, he locked himself and his readers into a blasted, playful zone, a sort of Jonathan Swift-meets-Marquis de Sade "humanoidspeak." The voice of Burroughs' prose is a profound and prophetic dementia that continually blows people away, and like all great writing it disturbed a lot of people (got banned, of course; this is America), including his immediate fans who had a gut need for disturbance. A surreal maelstrom of sex...