More letters from the Burroughs file
Proving that there's still life in the legacy of the Beats, Ecco Books is soon to release a new collection of letters from the éminence grise himself, William S. Burroughs. Rub Out the Words features letters from the end of the 1950s into the mid-'70s, a period in which Burroughs, owing to the controversy and subsequent popularity of Naked Lunch, found himself established on the literary map and in contact with a new cadre of artists.
While an earlier collection of letters concentrated almost exclusively on his correspondence with fellow Beats Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, Rub Out the Words focuses instead on Burroughs' letters to his family (grudgingly asking his parents for money) or to his drug-addicted writer son, William S. Burroughs, Jr., aka, "Billy," as well as Timothy Leary, Norman Mailer, and Brion Gysin, painter/poet and inventor of the "cut-up" technique. Though more direct than his usual boundary-busting prose, Rub Out the Words still bristles with sharp wit and moral outrage. Just what we'd expect from the original Wild Boy.
| A Thanksgiving Prayer | |
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