Works by
William S. Burroughs
(aka William Sieward Burroughs)
(Writer)
[1914 - 1997]

Books

• Evil River (Vol 2) (2008)

• Evil River (2007)

• Everything Lost: The Latin American Notebook of William S. Burroughs (2007)
  In late summer 1953, as he returned to Mexico City after a seven-month expedition through the jungles of Ecuador, Colombia, and Peru, William Burroughs began a notebook of final reflections on his four years in Latin America. His first novel, Junky, had just been published and he would soon be back in New York to meet Allen Ginsberg and together complete the manuscripts of what became The Yage Letters and Queer. Yet this notebook, the sole survivor from that period, reveals Burroughs not as a writer on the verge of success, but as a man staring down personal catastrophe and visions of looming cultural disaster.
  
  Losses that will not let go of him haunt Burroughs throughout the notebook: “Bits of it keep floating back to me like memories of a daytime nightmare.” However, out of these dark reflections we see emerge vivid fragments of Burroughs’ fiction and, even more tellingly, unique, primary evidence for the remarkable ways in which his early manuscripts evolved. Assembled in facsimile and transcribed by Geoffrey D. Smith, John M. Bennett, and Burroughs scholar Oliver Harris, the notebook forces us to change the way we see both Burroughs and his writing at a turning point in his literary biography.

• The Yage Letters Redux (2006) by Allen Ginsberg and  William Burroughs; Oliver Harris, ed.
  In January 1953, William S. Burroughs began an expedition into the jungles of South America to find yage, the fabled hallucinogen of the Amazon. From the notebooks he kept and the letters he wrote home to Allen Ginsberg, Burroughs composed a narrative of his adventures that later appeared as The Yage Letters. For this edition, Oliver Harris has gone back to the original manuscripts and untangled the history of the text, telling the fascinating story of its genesis and cultural importance. Also included in this edition are extensive materials, never before published, by both Burroughs and Ginsberg.

• This Is the Beat Generation: New York-San Francisco-Paris (2001) by James Campbell
  Beginning in New York in 1944, James Campbell finds the leading members of what was to become the Beat Generation in the shadows of madness and criminality. Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs had each seen the insides of a mental hospital and a prison by the age of thirty. A few months after they met, another member of their circle committed a murder that involved Kerouac and Burroughs as material witnesses.
  
  This book charts the transformation of these experiences into literature, and a literary movement that spread across the globe. From "The First Cut-Up"--the murder in New York in 1944--we end up in Paris in 1960 with William Burroughs at the Beat Hotel, experimenting with the technique that made him notorious, what Campbell calls "The Final Cut-Up."
  
  In between, we move to San Francisco, where Ginsberg gave the first public reading of Howl. We discover Burroughs in Mexico City and Tangiers; the French background to the Beats; the Buddhist influence on Kerouac, Gary Snyder, and others; the "Muses" Herbert Huncke and Neal Cassady; the tortuous history of On the Road; and the black ancestry of the white hipster.

• Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs (2000), James Grauerholz, ed.
  Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs is the most intimate book ever written by William S. Burroughs, the author of Naked Lunch and one of the most celebrated literary outlaws of our time. Last Words is a complex portrait of Burroughs at the end of his life, coming to terms with aging and death. While laid out as simple diary entries of the last nine months of his life, Last Words spans the realms of cultural criticism, personal memoir, and fiction.
  
  Classic Burroughs concerns - his rants on U.S. drug policy, his contempt for the state of the human race, his love for his cats - permeate the book. Burroughs breaks into classic "routines" and provides frequent commentary on whatever he is reading - from high literature to low-brow thrillers. Whether occupied with the banalities of life (housekeeping, dealing with doctors) or the glories (shooting a video with U2, opening a museum show of his paintings), the "Old Man" emerges as frequently comical, sometimes meditative, and always engaged-a commentator on the state of the world and the self. Most significantly, Last Words contains some of the most brutally personal prose Burroughs has ever written. His reflections on the deaths of his friends Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary provide a window onto the preparations Burroughs was making for his own death - a quest for absolution marked by a profound sense of guilt and loss.
  
  Last Words is unlike anything else in the oeuvre of William S. Burroughs. It is the purest, most personal work ever presented by this writer, and a poignant portrait of the man, his life, and his creative process-one that never quit, even in the shadow of death.

• Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader (1998), Ira Silverberg and James Grauerholz, eds.
  Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader follows major themes in Burroughs' oeuvre while also serving up a sampling of his darkly hilarious "routines," and is edited to serve as a tool for the scholar as well as an overview of his entire body of work for the general reader. Important biographical information, contained in the chapter introductions, provide key links to understanding the work in the context of the life. Ann Douglas's introductory essay provides further background on Burroughs in the context of American letters and his Beat contemporaries.
  
  Throughout a life that spanned the better part of the twentieth century, William Burroughs managed to be a visionary among writers: he imagined the Internet decades before its appearance and peered into the future of other technologies, kept the pace of world affairs and cultural trends, and, with each of his books, introduced new possibilities for the form. When he died in the summer of 1997, the world of letters lost its most elegant outsider.

• Ghost of Chance (1995)
  Ghost of Chance is an adventure story set in the jungle of Madagascar and filled with the obsessions that mark the work of the man who Norman Mailer once called, 'the only American writer possessed by genius.' While tripping through the author's trademark concerns-drugs, paranoia, and lemurs, this short novel tells an important story about environmental devastation in a way that only Burroughs can.

• My Education: A Book of Dreams (1995)

• Speed and Kentucky Ham (1993)

• The Letters of William S. Burroughs: Volume I: 1945-1959 (1993), Oliver Harris, ed.

• The Cat Inside (1992)
  Best known for the wild, phantasmagoric satire of works like Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs reveals another, gentler side in The Cat Inside. Originally published as a limited-edition volume, this moving and witty discourse on cats combines deadpan routines and dream passages with a heartwarming account of Burroughs's unexpected friendships with the many cats he has known. It is also a meditation on the long, mysterious relationship between cats and their human hosts, which Burroughs traces back to the Egyptian cult of the "animal other." With its street sense and whiplash prose, The Cat Inside is a genuine revelation for Burroughs fans and cat lovers alike.

• Interzone (1989) by William S. Burroughs with James Grauerholz

• Tornado Alley (1989) with S. Clay Wilson, Illustrator
  Stories, w/graphic comic art by S. Clay Wilson.

• Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S.Burroughs (1988) by Ted Morgan

• The Adding Machine: Selected Essays (1986, 1993)

• Ali's Smile, Naked Scientology (1985)
  Bilingual, German-English, published in Germany.

• Queer (1985)
  For more than three decades, while its writer's world fame increased, Queer remained unpublished because of its forthright depiction of homosexual longings. Set in the corrupt and spectral Mexico City of the forties, Queer is the story of William Lee, a man afflicted with both acute heroin withdrawal and romantic and sexual yearnings for an indifferent user named Eugene Allerton. The narrative is punctuated by Lee's outrageous 'routines' - brilliant comic monologues that foreshadow Naked Lunch - yet the atmosphere is heavy with foreboding. In his extraordinary introduction, Burroughs reflects on the shattering events in his life that lay behind this work. / William S. Burroughs (1914-1997) - guru of the Beat Generation, controversial éminence grise of the international avant-garde, dark prophet, and blackest of black humor satirists - had a range of influence rivaled by few post-World War II writers.

• The Burroughs File (1984)
  Trenchant writings by that sardonic ""hombre invisible,"" William Seward Burroughs, perpetrator of Naked Lunch and other shockers. These malefic and beatific, mordant and hilarious straight-face reports on life are mostly from scatter-shot publications in obscure places, foreign and domestic. Including complete texts from White Subway, Cobblestone Gardens, and The Retreat Diaries, this collection delineates Burroughs' comprehensive world-view and his ""insurrectionary sense of America's underside," as Tom Carson epitomized it in The Village Voice.
  
  Also included are essays on Burroughs by Alan Ansen and Paul Bowles, and facsimile pages from the famous cut-up scrapbooks of the mid-century: The Book of Hours, John Brady's Book, and The Old Farmer's Almanac.

• Letters to Allen Ginsberg 1953-1957 (1981)

• Port of Saints (1980)
  Somewhere a long time ago the summer ended....

• Ah Pook Is Here! (1979)

• Blade Runner (1979)
  Characters and situations in this book were based upon The Bladerunner by Alan E. Nourse. Except for the title, this book has nothing to do with the movie by Ridley Scott which was ultimately based upon a book by Philip K. Dick called Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.

• The Last Words of Dutch Schultz: A Fiction in the Form of a Film Script (1975)

• Exterminator! (1973)
  Conspirators plot to explode a train carrying nerve gas. A perfect servent suddenly reveals himself to be the insidious Dr. Fu Manchu. Science-fantasy wars, racism, corporate capitalism, drug addiction, and various medical and psychiatic horrors all play their parts in this mosaic-like, experimental novel.

• The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead (1971)
  The Wild Boys is a futuristic tale of global warfare in which a guerrilla gang of boys dedicated to freedom battles the organized armies of repressive police states. Making full use of his inimitable humor, wild imagination, and style, Burroughs creates a world that is as terrifying as it is fascinating.

• The Yage Letters (1963)

• The Cut Up Method of Brion Gysin (1962) (see also Brion Gysin)

• Minutes to Go (1960) by Brion Gysin, Gregory Corso, Sinclair Beiles, and William S. Burroughs

• Naked Lunch (1959)
  Naked Lunch is one of the most important novels of the twentieth century. Exerting its influence on the work of authors like Thomas Pynchon, J. G. Ballard, and William Gibson, on the relationship of art and obscenity, and on the shape of music, film, and media generally, it is one of the books that redefined not just literature but American culture.

• Junky (1953)
  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.

Cut Up Trilogy

1. The Soft Machine (1961)
   In Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs revealed his genius. In The Soft Machine he begins an adventure that will take us even further into the dark recesses of his imagination, a region where nothing is sacred, nothing taboo. Continuing his ferocious verbal assault on hatred, hype, poverty, war, bureaucracy, and addiction in all its forms, Burroughs gives us a surreal space odyssey through the wounded galaxies in a book only he could create.

2. The Ticket That Exploded (1962)
   In The Ticket That Exploded, William S. Burroughs’s grand cut-up trilogy, which began with The Soft Machine and continues through Nova Express, reaches its climax as Inspector Lee and the Nova Police engage the Nova Mob in a decisive battle for the planet.

3. Nova Express (1964)
   Nova Express takes William S. Burroughs’s nightmarish future one step beyond The Soft Machine. The diabolical Nova criminals have gained control and plan on wreaking untold destruction. It’s up to Inspector Lee of the Nova Police to attack and dismantle the word-and-imagery machine of these “control addicts” before it’s too late.

Places of the Dead Trilogy

1. Cities of the Red Night (1981)
   While young men wage war against an evil empire of zealous mutants, the population of this modern inferno is afflicted with the epidemic of a radioactive virus. An opium-infused apocalyptic vision from the legendary author of Naked Lunch is the first of the trilogy with The Places of the Dead Roads and his final novel, The Western Plains.

2. The Place of Dead Roads (1984)
   A good old-fashioned shoot-out in the American West of the frontier days serves as the springboard for this hyperkinetic adventure in which gunslingers lead by Kim Carson fight for galactic freedom.

3. The Western Lands (1987)
   Burroughs's eagerly awaited final novel in the trilogy begun with Cities of the Red Night and The Place of Dead Roads is a profound, revealing, and often astonishing meditation on mortality, loneliness, nuclear peril, and the inextinguishable hope for life after death.

Other

• Smiling through the Apocalypse: Esquire's History of the Sixties (1970) by Harold Hayes
  Includes contributions by Gore Vidal, James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, Timothy Leary, Tom Wolfe, William F. Buckley Jr., William Burroughs, and William Styron.

See also:

• William S. Burroughs (June 15, 2010 release by Phil Baker

• Beatific Souls: Jack Kerouac's On the Road (2008) by Isaac Gewirtz
  Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road was a touchstone for a generation and the centrepiece of the Beat movement in literature and art. This new book examines Kerouac's life and career, and accompanies a major exhibition at The New York Public Library to celebrate the 50th anniversary of On the Road's publication in 1957. Kerouac's achievement as both a literary and cultural figure is traced, including his innovations in narrative techniques and in character development. His counterculture vision is explored, showing his image as a seer and sage who wanted to save America from its obsession with consumerism, the inhibition of sexuality and other conventional bourgeois pieties. The author also explores Kerouac's relationships with Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs  and other Beats, as well as the Beat movement in general.

• Gang of Souls: A Generation of Beat Poets (2008, DVD)
  Maria Beatty, director with Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Marianne Faithfull, Richard Hell, and William S. Burroughs

• Cursed from Birth: The Short, Unhappy Life of William S. Burroughs, Jr. (2006) by William S. Burroughs Jr. with David Ohle, ed.
  Being the son of counter-culture author William S. Burroughs is bound to be a trial. After all, the man who frequented lesbian dives and had a fascination with firearms couldn't possibly make that great of a father. Perhaps inevitably, William Jr. (called Billy) referred to himself as "cursed from birth" and in the book of the same name editor David Ohle collects parts of Billy's third and unfinished novel Prakriti Junction, his last journals and poems, and correspondence and conversations to recreate this tortured life. Endowed with the sufferings — but not the patience — of Job, Billy's life was often characterized by tragedy and frustration, although there were also pockets of success and levity. More than just the memoir of a casualty of the Beat Generation, Cursed From Birth provides rare insight in Billy's father, as well as his scene, friends, and times. It also provides an all-too-familiar story of familial difficulties that anyone with difficult parents can understand and appreciate.

• The Lost Years of William S. Burroughs: Beats in South Texas (2006) by Rob Johnson
  The sometimes raunchy, often legally dubious New York and Mexican exploits of William S. Burroughs, one of the godfathers of the "Beat" generation, are well known. Less familiar are his experiences in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of South Texas, where for several years he was a cotton farmer (while avoiding the law in New York). This intriguing chapter in the famous author’s life is thoroughly recounted for the first time in Rob Johnson’s new book.
  
  From 1946 to 1949 Bill Burroughs prepared himself for the writing of his first books by, among other pursuits, raising marijuana and opium poppies and entertaining Beat visitors such as Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady at his farm in New Waverly, Texas. Less known, though, are stories about his other farm, a "serious" fifty-acre spread, in the Valley near Edinburg, described in the 1977 edition of Junky. Here he raised legal crops such as cotton, carrots, and peas. Other Beat writers move casually in and out of the narrative, which includes the "William Tell" episode in Mexico in which Burroughs fatally shot his wife, who had placed a drink glass on her head as a target.
  
  As a setting in Burroughs’s work, the Valley is central in Junky (1953), "Tiger in the Valley" (an unpublished 1955 short story), and, to a lesser extent, Queer (1985). But the Valley recurs as a setting in almost all of his books, in some form or another.

  Rob Johnson conducted over forty hours of interviews with people in South Texas and Mexico who knew Burroughs, his business partner Kells Elvins, and other "South Texas Beats." Johnson paints a picture of a fascinating place, time, and people: South Texas and Northern Mexico in the post–World War II period and the Anglos, Mexican Americans, and Mexicans who lived there.

• Retaking the Universe: William S. Burroughs in the Age of Globalization (2004), Davis Schneiderman and Philip Walsh, eds.
  William S. Burroughs is one of America's most influential and widely studied writers. A leading member of the Beat movement, his books and essays continue to attract a wide readership. His films, paintings, recordings and other projects that grew out of his literary work, together with his iconic persona as a counter-culture (anti-)hero, mean his work has become a broad cultural phenomenon.
  This collection of essays by leading scholars offers an interdisciplinary consideration of Burroughs's work. It links his lived experience – as junkie, bohemian, queer, drug-addict, visionary and much else besides – to his many major prose works written from 1953 on, as well his sound, cinema and media projects. Moving beyond the merely literary, the contributors argue for the continuing social and political relevance of Burroughs's work for the emerging global order.
  
  Themes include: Burroughs and contemporary theory; debates on 'reality'; violence; magic and mysticism ; cybernetic cultures; language and technology; control and transformation; transgression and addiction; the limits of prose; image politics and the avant-garde.

• Sidetripping (2001) by Charles Gatewood and William S. Burroughs

• Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of Wiliam S. Burroughs, 1960-1997 (2000), Sylvère Lotringer, ed.
  Burroughs Live gathers all the interviews, both published and unpublished, given by William Burroughs, as well as conversations with well-known writers, artists, and musicians such as Allen Ginsberg, Brion Gysin, Gregory Corso, Keith Richards, Tennessee Williams, Timothy Leary, and Patti Smith. The book provides a fascinating account of Burroughs's life as a literary outlaw. Illuminating many aspects of his work and many facets of his mind, it brings out his scathing humor, powerful intelligence, and nightmarish vision.

• The Beat Hotel: Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Corso in Paris, 1958-1963 (2000) by Barry Miles
  The Beat Hotel is a delightful chronicle of a remarkable moment in American literary history. From the Howl obscenity trial to the invention of the cut-up technique, Barry Miles's extraordinary narrative chronicles the feast of ideas that was Paris, where the Beats took awestruck audiences with Duchamp and Celine, and where some of their most important work came to fruition--Ginsberg's "Kaddish" and "To Aunt Rose"; Gregory Corso's The Happy Birthday of Death; and William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch. Based on firsthand accounts from diaries, letters, and many original interviews, The Beat Hotel is an intimate look at an era of spirit, dreams, and genius.

• Timothy Leary: Outside Looking In: Appreciations, Castigations, and Reminiscences (1999) by Robert Forte
  A memorial volume to one of this century's most colorful and pioneering figures in the consciousness movement
  
  A wide array of individuals from all stages of Leary's life provides a comprehensive view of the man and his impact on American culture
  
  One of the most influential and controversial people of the 20th century, Timothy Leary inspired profound feelings--both pro and con--from everyone with whom he came into contact. He was extravagant, grandiose, enthusiastic, erratic, and an unrelenting proponent of expanding consciousness and challenging authority. His experiments with psilocybin and LSD at Harvard University and Millbrook, New York, were instrumental in propelling the nation into the psychedelic era of the 1960s. From the 1980s until his death in 1996 he fully embraced the possibilities of freedom offered by the developments in computer technology and the instant communication made possible by the Internet.
  
  The essence of Leary's life has often been reduced to the celebrated formula of "Turn On, Tune In, and Drop Out." The wider implications of this esoteric call to communion have been lost, just as the multifaceted nature of Leary's personality was obscured by the superficial spin put on his life and ideas. In this book a wide array of individuals from all stages of Leary's life, friends and foes alike, provides a more complete view of the man and his impact on American culture.
  
  It is still too early to know how posterity will judge the man and his ideas, but Timothy Leary: Outside Looking In shows that Leary was often so far ahead of his time that few could follow the extensive range of his thought.
  
  Includes Appreciations, Castigations, and Reminiscences by Allen Ginsberg, Andrew Weil, Hunter S. Thompson, Huston Smith, Ram Dass, William Burroughs, Winona Ryder, and Others.

• Gentleman Junkie: The Life and Legacy of William S. Burroughs (1998) by Graham Caveney
  William S. Burroughs, founding father of America's counterculture, was born in 1914 into a wealthy St. Louis family. He originally planned to be a doctor but soon found another calling: literary outlaw and professional iconoclast. During his youth, he led a life almost as strange as his writing, drifting from job to job--as bartender, private detective, and insect exterminator--before writing his first book, Junkie, a harrowing account of his fifteen-year heroin addiction. But it was Naked Lunch, a surreal Dante's Inferno of narcotics, urban nightmares, and explicit sex, that became his masterpiece and made him an icon of the avant-garde, and sealed his role as hero to generations of artists, poets, punks, and rock musicians. By the time of his death in the summer of 1997, he was not only the last surviving Beat but the acknowledged granddaddy of America's counterculture, with everyone from Apple Computer's Steve Jobs to Philip Glass to U2 claiming him as an inspiration.Now, with Gentleman Junkie, Graham Caveney gives us the definitive life of William S. Burroughs--less a biography than a "chronology of the Burroughs phenomenon," an examination of the myth behind the man. Filled with 150 color photos--many of them never seen before--and new biographical material, Gentleman Junkie shows how Burroughs's fascinating life, from Harvard to Greenwich Village to Tangiers, was matched only by his enormous impact on modern literature and pop culture. Dapper radical, literary experimentalist, and mentor to countless artists, Burroughs had an indelible influence on American culture.

• My Kind of Angel: I. M . William Burroughs (1998), Rupert Loydell and William S. Burroughs, eds.
  A collection of interviews with William Burroughs and various critical writings on his work. Also included are poetry and prose pieces written by various authors in tribute to the late writer.

• Ports of Entry (1996), Robert A. Sobieszek, ed.
  Lavishly illustrated catalog to Burrough's exhibit.

• Rapid Eye 1 (1996), Simon Dwyer, ed.
  Painters, cyberpunks, dog-boys, mad scientists, occultists, neoists, performance artists, film-makers, writerss, leopard-girls and voodoo horsemen. Hacking into the new virtual geography, where time and space do not exist, but where thought survives, as in art. In this age of transition and sensory overload, new ideas and organisations of perception form. To be marginalised, misunderstood, ignored, reviled. But melancholy can fuel creation. Imagination can replace fantasy. Hope can overcome fear. Different interpretations of the past and fresh approaches to art and technology can ensure the evolution and refinement of the perception of everyday life. In the virtual universe, there is no death.

• William S. Burroughs At the Front: Critical Reception, 1959 - 1989 (1991), Jennie Skerl and Robin Lydenberg, eds.
  Jennie Skerl and Robin Lydenberg have selected twenty-five critical essays on Burroughs that reflect the historical reception of his work, both positive and negative, decade by decade, and that represent the best essays written about him.
   
  The essays cover Burroughs’ major novels—including the cut-up and new trilogies—the censorship issue, and his work in film and painting. The chronological organization brings into critical focus the shift from moral questions raised by the novels’ content, through examinations of Burroughs’ relationship to humanism and modernism, and finally to more focused literary and linguistic issues. In their introduction, the editors survey the progress of Burroughs’ critical reception and examine the reasons for the varied and intense responses to the work and the theoretical assumptions behind those responses.
   
  The reviewers include prominent figures such as Mary McCarthy and Marshall McLuhan as well as major academic critics such as Cary Nelson, Tony Tanner, and Ihab Hassan.

• The Job: Interviews with William S. Burroughs (1989) by Daniel Odier and William S. Burroughs

• Aquarius Revisited: Seven Who Created the Sixties Counterculture That Changed America (1987) by Bruce Vanwyngarden and Peter O. Whitmer
  Includes information on Allen Ginsberg, Hunter S. Thompson, Ken Kesey, Norman Mailer, Timothy Leary, Tom Robbins, and William Burroughs

• With William Burroughs: A Report from the Bunker (1981) by Victor Bockris
  Burroughs, the eccentric, brilliant artist who burned the bridge with logic and wrote the classic Naked Lunch, has a court recorder in Victor Bockris. Bockris has collected into a cogent whole the man's most brilliant moments of conversation, thinking, and interview repartee. This fascinating material, gleaned from the fertile time at Burroughs's New York headquarters, the Bunker (which was located on the Bowery, three blocks from CBGB), encompasses the years 1974 to 1980, and also includes a 1991 Burroughs interview from Interview magazine. The Beats' devotion to subjective experience has left readers with a profound amount of objective material to analyze and debate. Choice public and private utterances, hallucinatory and prescient diatribes such as these, remain rich sources of literary history. As Americans we find the Beats' approach to life romantic, even heroic. Tearing the walls down in the name of freedom and spirituality strikes a particularly pilgrimesque chord. With William Burroughs: A Report from the Bunker is a fascinating compendium of Burroughs-speak, so complete it can be considered a credo.