Call me burroughs a life
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(Twelve, $32)
William S. Burroughs was a drug addict, a murderer, a sex fiend, a pervert, a drunk, and an all-round creep, said Michael Dirda in The Washington Post. He was also charismatic, though, and “one of the most influential writers of the 20th century.” In this “mesmerizing page-turner” of a biography, you get the whole story—if you weren’t looking for a detailed consideration of Naked Lunch, Junky, or any of the rest of Burroughs’s oeuvre. Barry Miles, who knew his subject personally and has written biographies of other Beat legends, “recognizes why Burroughs matters” but focuses here on the man’s extraordinary life.
Though Miles doesn’t judge his subject, “Burroughs emerges as a largely unsympathetic and sad figure,” said Matthew Gilbert in The Boston Globe. Born into a wealthy St. Louis family in , he “spent an inordinate amount of his lifetime scoring and using drugs,” and he regularly let down family and friends. He had sex with men and women, “but mostly with boys,” many of them impoverished, and when he fatally shot his wife in Mexico in while attempting a drunken William Tell–like stunt, he sloughed off his young son on the boy’s
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Call Me Burroughs: A Life
You can cabaret my regard of his Naked Lunch here:
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The candid Burroughs, though thoroughly prodigy of malevolency and unexplainable and inexpedient actions, was also wracked with tenderheartedness, empathy, alarm, sorrow, desolation, and wish to get into loved. Sand tended succeed travel wear out, and allow, the get bigger erratic contemporary untrustworthy pleasant companions
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Call Me Burroughs, A Life
Call Me Burroughs (US edition):
NYC: The Twelve,
Introduction to the W.S.B. journal:
Call Me Burroughs, a Life, was published on February 5, , the th anniversary of Bill’s birth. The authorized biography was originally commissioned by Grove Press in New York in from James Grauerholz, the man who knows more about Burroughs than anyone else on earth. He was Bill’s friend and confidante for 23 years, he was Bill’s adopted son and now, after Bill’s death is his heir and the executor of his estate. James did a phenomenal amount of research, and wrote a number of research papers that I have drawn heavily upon, including Burroughs in Chicago – the wartime period –The Death of Joan Vollmer Burroughs, an almost book-length study, looking at every scrap of detail and reporting on all and every angle. He also wrote another carefully researched study of Bill’s childhood in St. Louis and his family background.
&#;Miles pens a dense, detailed, yet wonderfully readable and entertaining narrative that illuminates, without sensationalizing, Burroughs’s manifold peculiarities.&#; &#; Publisher&#;s Weekly
UK edition
Reviews:
- Publisher&#;s Weekly, Jan,
- Jan 20,
- The Bos