The immortal awfulness of "Naked Lunch": "
Everybody remembers his first time. Nobody talks about William S. Burroughs's 'Naked Lunch,' which celebrated its 50th birthday this past November (dated from its 1959 publication in Paris by Maurice Girodias' infamous Olympia Press), without indulging in a dreamily solipsistic nostalgia trip. Lewis Jones, in the London Spectator: 'When I first read 'Naked Lunch,' as a teenager sleeping rough in a Greek olive grove ...'; Barry Miles, the author of a hilariously credulous Burroughs biography ('El Hombre Invisible') and co-editor of this commemorative volume, on a Columbia University panel: 'I was living in this hippie commune apartment in London ... The book completely knocked me out, the epitome of stoned humor and bohemian subversion.'
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