Burroughs, William S.

Conversations with William S. Burroughs (Edited by Allen Hibbard)

Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 2000. First Edition. Softcover. [ISBN: 9781578061839]. "The interviews collected here provide an aperture into the philosophies, methods, and quirks of a man who wrote Queer, Junky, Naked Lunch, Nova Express, Cities of the Red Night, My Education, and many other works...Not surprisingly, the topics Burroughs touches upon are wide-ranging: his relationships to the Beats, legends surrounding his personal life, drugs, gay liberation, collaboration, the cut-up technique, science fiction, politics, conspiracy theory, censorship, cats, guns, David Cronenberg's movie adaptation of Naked Lunch, shotgun art, dreams, and life in Lawrence, Kansas, where he spent his last years." (Back Cover blurb). In a separate curation for Burroughs' "The Wild Boys: a Book of the Dead" (#3987) I quoted esteemed writer and onetime teacher [for a fiery stint] at Black Mountain College, Alfred Kazin's December 12, 1971 New York Times Book Review article on that work. Interestingly, the back cover blurb on this book continues with a reference to Kazin, ostensibly from another source, where he calls Burroughs "...an engineer of the pen, a calmly interested specialist of the new processes. When Burroughs makes philosophic and scientific claims for his disorderly collections of data, we happily recognize under the externally calm surface of the interview, the kind of inner frenzy that is his genius--and which, in all of us, his books make an appeal." Kazin is surely onto something here--I think his insight is not altogether removed from what Ginsberg would have recognized in WSB...some variation on the "holy" "...mad black sunflower" peculiarity of Bill's mind that made Allen see what he saw in it. This is an excellent collection of interviews, and sealed copies like this are going to be hard to come by. Not in the Shoaf or Schottlaender bibliographies, but a must for any Burroughs-&-Beyond collection. As New. [Item #4137]

Price: $30.00