Junky: The Definitive Text of "Junk" (50th Anniversary Edition)
by William S. Burroughs
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Book Summary Information
Author: William S. BurroughsEditor: Oliver Harris
Introduction: Oliver Harris
Foreword: Allen Ginsberg
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2003-04-01
ISBN: 0142003166
Number of pages: 166
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Book Reviews of Junky: The Definitive Text of "Junk" (50th Anniversary Edition)
Book Review: Transcends Beat Nonsense
Summary: 5 Stars
I am no fan of the Beat Movement. As a subculture, the Beats contributed more than their fair share of sewage to the literary rivers of Western Civilization, and bear a good deal of responsibility for the ongoing decadence and decline of our culture. However, this autobiographical examination of the underbelly of American society is a one-of-a-kind expose, written by a man who himself was unabashedly addicted to morphine and other opiates, and who spares the reader from soul-searching in order simply to tell what it is like to be hooked.
I bought this book for a student in my high school English class and started reading it as soon as I got it home. The next day in class, the student was absent, so I kept reading, knowing I was hooked. How ironic. I kept the book and bought the student another copy. Couldn't put it down.
The tone is detached and the descriptions of the sights, sounds, and smells of Burroughs' dark haunts wrap themselves around you in such a way that you live what he experienced. There is no plea here for understanding or sympathy. Instead, you view the characters and events as if they are rats doing what rats do in a lab experiment. You come away from this book thinking, So that's how it is to be a junky.
It's quite incredible, really. I came to the book with absolutely minimal interest and started reading out of curiousity, expecting to put the book aside after the first ten pages or so. How wrong can a guy be? Burroughs did society a service with this text by demystifying the junky's world and demythologizing the hype about junkys that the mainstream media and medical elites had foisted upon most of us non-junkys. The dialogue is engrossing, the lengths to which Burroughs goes to score his junk truly amazing.
The narrative flows effortlessly, and some of the descriptions, such as that of the Rio Grande Valley, border on the lyrical. Yet, the strongest point is the tone of utter detachment: "I went into the bathroom to take a shot. I was a long time hitting a vein. The needle clogged twice. Blood ran down my arm. The junk spread through my body, an injection of death."
Even if you despise the Beat message as I do, you will not regret having opened your mind to the controlled insanity of being a junky. Highly recommended.
Summary of Junky: The Definitive Text of "Junk" (50th Anniversary Edition)
Before his 1959 breakthrough, Naked Lunch, an unknown William S. Burroughs wrote Junk, his first book, a candid, eyewitness account of times and places that are now long gone. This book brings them vividly to life again; it is an unvarnished field report from the American postwar underground. For this definitive 50th-anniversary edition, eminent Burroughs scholar Oliver Harris has painstakingly re-created the author's original text, word by word, from archival typescripts. Here for the first time are Burroughs's own unpublished Introduction and an entire omitted chapter, along with many "lost" passages and auxiliary texts by Allen Ginsberg and others. Harris's comprehensive Introduction reveals the composition history of Junk's text and places its contents against a lively historical background.Classics Books
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