Featured here is the title, Nova Express, by William S. Burroughs. Published by Grove Press, Inc. New York: First Edition, Stated First Printing, 1964. 187 pages.
Book Excerpt:
With the publication in this country of Naked Lunch, William Burroughs was hailed as among the most important modern American writers. That book, as John Ciardi said, was a “powerful empathetic descent into the Hell of dope addiction.” His next novel is a fantasy, travesty, and manifesto of the war against Hell.
Inspector J. Lee, Nova Police, defines the purpose of Nova Express as the exposure and the arrest of the nova criminals. “In Naked Lunch, Soft Machine and Nova Express I show who they are and what they are doing and what they will do if they are not arrested.” The “boards syndicates and governments of the earth” are “liars cowards collaborators traitors,” and their Garden of Delights is a “terminal sewer.”
So the battle shapes up, hallucinatory interplanetary cops and robbers game with the nova police on one side and the nova mob on the other. ….. (the mob) are resourceful and malevolent, employing all the weapons of science to stampede, confuse, create conflicts.
The nova police are equally resourceful, but they face a fearful job: “In all my experience as a police officer I have never seen such a total fear and degradation on any planet.” Their aim is to arrest the criminals and turn them over to the Biologic Courts (“for the indicated alterations”), but the courts themselves are corrupted, adrift like floating crap games, drugged, seduced to Venusian sex practices.
Bruce has again created a masterpiece of fantasy and reality, the carnival of horrors, a doomsday confrontation of man and his world. …..
With Nova Express, Burroughs has added another grotesque layer to his edifice of corruption and decay, outrage and protest, hysteria and laughter. Like Naked Lunch, it is shocking and unsettling, but it also intensifies the note which serious critics detected in the earlier book: the author’s insistence that what he proposes be literally taken by us as a prescription for our sanity.
Here’s a list of newspaper clippings included:
August 1997, The Associated Press.
Beat ‘godfather’ Burroughs dies in Kansas at 83.
By Maria Sudekum.
(clipping)
August 10, 1997, The New York Times.
Word for Word / Obscenity Trial.
Naked Lunches and Reality Sandwiches: How the Beats Beat the First Amendment.
Introduction by George Judson.
(1 page)
August 4, 1997, The New York Times Obituaries.
William S. Burroughs, the Beat Writer Who Distilled His Raw Nightmare Life, Dies at 83.
By Richard Severo.
(clipping, page A12)
August 4, 1997, The New York Times.
What Burroughs Read, Letter To the Editor.
By Hugh Siegel.
(clipping)
August 3, 1997, The Sunday Oregonian.
Continued from page One
Burroughs: Wife’s killing launched career as writer.
(clipping)
November 26, 1996, The New York Times.
The Living Arts.
For Burroughs at 82, A Legion of Fans Under the Influence.
By Kathryn Shattuck.
(clipping - 1 sheet, page B1, back is truncated clipped page B2)
August 9, 1996, The New York Times Obituaries.
Herbert Huncke, the Hipster Who Defined ‘Beat,’ Dies at 81.
By Robert McG. Thomas Jr.
(clipping)
*****
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