“In the City Market is the Meet Café. Followers of obsolete, unthinkable trades doodling in Etruscan, addicts of drugs not yet synthesized, pushers of souped-up harmine, junk reduced to pure habit offering precarious vegetable serenity, liquids to induce Latah, Tithonian longevity serums, black marketeers of World War III, excusers of telepathic sensitivity, osteopaths of the spirit, investigators of infractions denounced by bland paranoid chess players, servers of fragmentary warrants taken down in hebephrenic shorthand charging unspeakable mutilations of the spirit, bureaucrats of spectral departments, officials of unconstituted police states, a Lesbian dwarf who has perfected operation Bang-utot, the lung erection that strangles a sleeping enemy, sellers of orgone tanks and relaxing machines, brokers of exquisite dreams and memories tested on the sensitized cells of junk sickness and bartered for raw materials of the will, doctors skilled in the treatment of diseases dormant in the black dust of ruined cities, gathering virulence in the white blood of eyeless worms feeling slowly to the surface and the human host, maladies of the ocean floor and the stratosphere, maladies of the laboratory and atomic war... A place where the unknown past and the emergent future meet in a vibrating soundless hum... Larval entities waiting for a Live One...”

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About William S. Burroughs

American writer and visual artist

William S. Burroughs was an American writer and visual artist, widely associated with the Beat Generation and postmodern literature. He became known for fiction that pushed against conventional form and voice. His work is often experimental, with unreliable narrators and semi-autobiographical material shaped by his experience of drug addiction. He also helped popularize the cut-up technique with Brion Gysin. Across his fiction and his life, recurring interests included mysticism, the occult, and magical themes.

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Books by William S. Burroughs

Naked Lunch

2001

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Cities of the Red Night

1982

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Nova Express

1964

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