In the following essay, adapted from a 1974 radio program, Girodias of Olympia Press speaks with William Burroughs, whose controversial novel, Naked Lunch, he published in 1959, and Allen Ginsburg, the author of Howl, which was the subject of a landmark censorship trial in 1957. Also part of the conversation are Carl Solomon, who published Burrough's 1953 book, Junkie as a pulp paperback, and James Grauerholz, Burrough's assistant. The 1962 trial of Naked Lunch was the last major censorship t...

In the following essay, Parkinson provides an appreciation of Naked Lunch.

[Burroughs] noted that there is an important difference between Naked Lunch and the books that follow …: his adaptation of the cut-up method of Brion Gysin. The Soft Machine develops out of the quest in the early novels, but the question that boldly opens the "Atrophied Preface" at the end of Naked Lunch is perhaps more important than the complex answers to it in the later works. "Wouldn't You?" triggers an elaborate program of anarchic individualism aimed at revita...

Twenty years ago, William Burroughs published the most brilliant satire in English since Gulliver's Travels. The Naked Lunch, indeed, has many points of similarity with Swift's masterpiece: a mocking contempt for power and its wielders, a shrinking disgust from the flesh (in both cases resulting in some of the most revolting scatalogical passages ever printed), a vision of mankind as almost irredeemably base, a keen eye for moral soft spots in the prevailing culture, a hatred of jargon and pom...

I would like to be able to say that Cities Of The Red Night is William Burroughs' most successful fiction since Naked Lunch, that it pushes beyond the kaleidoscopic kineticism of that telegraphic masterpiece to discover some terrible beauty powerful enough to shock us out of our complacency as the planet is poisoned. Although the book is full if its stunning surprises, they may shock only the uninitiated. Burroughs has by now been transcribing his renegade vision of apocalypse and plague for over thr...

It's hard to imagine what once seemed so liberating about The Naked Lunch, a famous cult novel of the Beat generation. A not unsympathetic critic, Leslie Fiedler, found much of it 'dull protest literature, manifestoes against cops and in favour of junkies and homosexuals'—which is not sympathetic, but not right either. I can't call to mind anything less 'in favour of' drugs or homosexuals. Burroughs was being honest about his own opium addiction, which he saw...