Interzone

Burroughs has incredible insight and an unmatched knack for spotting a con. This book contains an invaluable collection of short stories and journal rants that really showcase an emerging writer exploding with ideas in the transient surroundings of Tangier, which he describes as "the listening post of the world":"Here East meets West in a final debacle of misunderstanding, each seeking the Answer, the Secret, from the other and not finding it, because neither has the Answer to give".You hear firsthand his ideas and theories on writing so this is probably the best introduction to William Burroughs, as you prepare with the artist himself, stranded in interzone, for the arrival of a much more fragmented and explosive Naked Lunch.

good stuff

GOOD BOOK

Good introduction to Burroughs. This book has to be read before Naked Lunch.

Book title was torn and chewed on. Very work weathered look. Still readable

The Interzone is the International Zone in Tangier, Morocco where William Burroughs lived for a time after his accidental shooting of his wife while stupendously high caused him to leave Mexico in something of a hurry. The time that Burroughs spent living in Tangier was greatly influential in the development of his writing style and subject matter and so it is fitting that Interzone is the title of this excellent collection of his early short stories. Interzone features many of the characters and concepts that would be developed more fully in Burroughs' more famous works such as Nova Express and the seminal Naked Lunch. Although the quality of the stories collected in Interzone is rather variable, the collection is immensely important as marking the turning point from the more traditional first-person style of Burroughs' earlier novels like Junky and Queer to his later, more experimental works.Interzone is divided into three distinct sections, the first of which being simply called Stories. Perhaps the most notable of the Stories is "Twilight's Last Gleamings" which was originally written in 1938 in collaboration with Burroughs' childhood friend Kells Elvins and is widely accepted as being his first attempt at fiction. Although the story as it appears here in Interzone is a copy from memory of the original, it is still the most complete version of the original that was written by Burroughs and Elvins after they were inspired by hearing about the sinking of the ship the Morro Castle. The majority of Burroughs' stories are autobiographical to a certain extent, sometimes very disturbingly so. This is particularly true in the case of "The Finger", a fictionalised account of how Burroughs came to deliberately cut off the last joint of his little finger in an effort to impress a young man in 1939 and how the episode led to a brief spell in a psychiatric hospital. Of the rest of the Stories "The Junky's Christmas" is perhaps the best and most poignant, telling as it does the story of Danny the Car Wiper, a young junky desperate to score a hit on Christmas Day.The second section of Interzone is entitled Lee's Journals and is a further grouping of short stories, this time all written as the first-person recollections of Burroughs' alter ego William Lee. The musings of Lee's Journals were assembled from letters written by Burroughs to Alan Ginsberg and from notes he wrote in an attempt to find his own literary voice and to record his time in Tangier. The journals are particularly interesting for the insight that they give to Burroughs' own struggle and attempts to define himself and to develop his writing, some of the included entries were even written while Burroughs was undergoing heroin cures at Benchimal Hospital, and for the sometimes vicious characterisations of Burroughs' real-life friends and enemies.WORD was originally written as part of the Naked Lunch manuscript but since only a few passages survived into the final draft, it is included in Interzone as a novella making up the third section. WORD is particularly significant as, out of all the material collected in Interzone, it best shows the complete transformation that Burroughs' work underwent as his writing shifted from the conventional to `the manic, surreal, wilfully disgusting and violently purgative regurgitation of seemingly random images'. Interestingly, although WORD marked a turning point in Burroughs' career from which he would never retreat, it's tone and style are quite unique since he never again went quite so far as to produce such a profane, sometimes incomprehensible, word soup.Although Junky and Queer were written earlier, it is only through reading Interzone that it is possible to get a true sense of the development of William Burroughs' literary style and to gain an insight into the genesis of his greatest works, particularly his masterpiece Naked Lunch.

Interzone was the working title for William S. Burroughs's most famous novel, Naked Lunch. The title has also been used to refer to this 1989 collection of short stories and other Burroughs odds and sods. I have had Interzone in my collection for at least 23 years, yet never read it until now. My grand clear-the-shelves project, where I give away my books after I read them in order to make space for others, is nearing its end. Now that I have read Interzone, there are only about five that I plan to toss when I get around to reading them.Burroughs can certainly write a flowing short story, one where the pages seem to turn themselves. I enjoyed the short story section best of all. I am a squeamish reader when it comes to any depictions of bodily mutilation. The worst reading experience I ever had in this regard was getting through all of American Psycho. I have to confess that I felt faint while reading the short story entitled "The Finger", wherein Burroughs described how he chopped off the tip of his little finger with poultry shears. This was at the lowest point of his drug addictions and emotional state, as he mutilated himself in his attempt to impress a future male lover.I do like Burroughs's imagery, and two remarks he made about the living dead gave me a chuckle. Both are from the second section entitled Lee's Journals:"Morton said to me: 'How long were you in medical school before they found out you weren't a corpse?'"and:"Foster, one of my anthropology friends in Mexico, died of bulbar polio. 'He was dead when he walked in the door,' the doctor at the hospital said later. 'I felt like telling him, "Why don't you check straight into a funeral parlor, pick your coffin and climb into it? You've got just about time."'In 1984 the original manuscript for Interzone or Naked Lunch which was believed to be lost was found among Allen Ginsberg's papers at Columbia University. One sizable chunk that had been cut from the eventual publication of Naked Lunch was the sixty-page long rambling set of words entitled, fittingly, WORD (all in capitals). The editorial advice to delete WORD from the eventual manuscript of Naked Lunch was wise, as it is nothing but an incoherent mumbling of ungrammatical phrases from a closeted queer high on horse. James Grauerholz, the editor of Interzone, described WORD as "the longest and most unusual section" as well as "a manic, surreal, willfully disgusting and violently purgative regurgitation of seemingly random images" and a "profane, first-person sibylline word salad". I found it to be totally unreadable, a chore that took me hours which no amount of rereading could clarify. What do you expect from a guy whose sole preoccupation is finding a vein? Burroughs has always used scatological (in its original, Greek-derived sense) and phallic imagery throughout his work and WORD was swimming in it. WORD was tiring, and literally put me to sleep in frustration several times.For readers of Burroughs who are interested in learning more about the evolution of the writer, Grauerholz makes the following assessment at the end of the introduction:"This book is meant to portray the development of Burroughs' mature writing style, and to present a selection of vintage Burroughs from the mid-1950s--a kind of writing he can no more repeat than he can once again be forty-four years old in Tangier. The willfully outrageous tone of voice represents the exorcism of his four decades of oppressive sexual and social conditioning, and his closely-observed experience of mankind's inexhaustible ugliness and ignorance. Only by dispensing with any concept of 'bad taste' or self-repression could he liberate his writing instrument to explore the landscapes of Earth and Space in his work written over the following thirty years. Reading Interzone, you are present at the beginning."

but i prefer full novels to story collections. i bought this to be a completest...