He shot like he wrote-with extreme precision and no fear.'- Hunter S. For his sheer visionary power, and for his humor, I admire Burroughs more than any living writer, and most of those who are dead.'- J.G. 'The most important writer to emerge since World War II. He was anarchy's double agent, an implacable enemy of conformity and of all agencies of control-from government to opiates.'- Rolling Stone 'Of all the Beat Generation writers, William S.

'Reads today as fresh and unvarnished as it ever has.'- Will Self on Junky 'synopsis' may belong to another edition of this title. Burroughs's first novel is a cult classic and a critical part of his oeuvre. From the tenements of New York to the queer bars of New Orleans, Junky takes the reader into a world at once long-forgotten and still with us today. For this definitive edition, renowned Burroughs scholar Oliver Harris has gone back to archival typescripts to re-created the author's original text word by word. The Burroughs-like protagonist of the novel, Bill Lee, see-saws between periods of addiction and rehab, using a panoply of substances including heroin, cocaine, marijuana, paregoric (a weak tincture of opium) and goof balls (barbiturate), amongst others. In his debut novel, Junky, Burroughs fictionalized his experiences using and peddling heroin and other drugs in the 1950s into a work that reads like a field report from the underworld of post-war America.

Junk is not, like alcohol or a weed, a means to increased enjoyment of life.

Junky the definitive text of junk