Reviews of Junky
“One of the most compelling and brilliant challenges any contemporary writer has raised against the absurd jurisdiction of death.”
The Washington Post
“Junky is unrivalled….It reads today as fresh and unvarnished as it ever has.”
Will Self
“The debut of the man who is now a grand panjandrum of the drug culture and the experimental “prose novel”… [Junky] is a reductio ad absurdum of the picaresque.”
Anatole Broyard, The New York Times
“William Burroughs’ works are, more precisely, potluck: the cauldron, having flipped its lid, spills nightmare fantasies, sick jokes, narcotic dreams and polemics against pushers and in favor of the apomorphine cure.”
“Forty years on, the grim realist’s detailing of a user’s harsh lifestyle remains as vital and as visceral as ever.”
Daily Telegraph (UK)
“I think in the English language William Burroughs is… the most original and important novelist to have emerged since the Second World War.”
J.G. Ballard, Sunday Times (UK)
“William was a shootist. He shot like he wrote – with extreme precision and no fear.”
Hunter S. Thompson
“William Burroughs was the person who broke the door down. When I read Burroughs, it changed my vision of what you could write about, how you could write.”
Lou Reed
“William Burroughs is the father of heavy metal and the true guardian of electric space.”
Patti Smith
“He was the 20th-century drug culture’s Poe, its Artaud, its Baudelaire. He was the prophet of the literature of pure experience, a phenomenologist of dread.... Burroughs had the scary genius to turn the junk wasteland into a parallel universe, one as thoroughly and obsessively rendered as Blake’s.”
Gary Kamyia, Salon