This is a bibliography of the works of William S. Burroughs .
Stories and novellas
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Collaborations
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The Final Academy Documents, with experimental film collaborations of Brion Gysin, Antony Balch, John Giorno, and others, based on a tour organized by David Dawson, Roger Ely, and Genesis P-Orridge. A DVD of edited highlights from the tour, including Burroughs's 1982 appearance reading from his work at Manchester's The Haçienda, a performance by Giorno and includes the experimental film collaborations with Balch, Gysin, and others, Towers Open Fire and Ghosts at No. 9. [6] [7] [8]
Burroughs appeared as himself in a number of films in the 1980s and 1990s, including the 1986 Laurie Anderson concert film Home of the Brave (in which Burroughs dances a slow-motion tango with Anderson during one number and provides vocal samples in other parts of the film), and the documentaries Heavy Petting and What Happened to Kerouac?
Burroughs also played a cameo part in the film Drugstore Cowboy, and his recording of The Junky's Christmas formed the basis for a 1993 animated short film of the same title in which Burroughs himself appears. He collaborated on the documentary Words of Advice: William S. Burroughs on the Road eventually released in 2007. An animated short film based upon his story "Ah Pook is Here" has also been produced.
Gus Van Sant, director of Drugstore Cowboy, made a short film in 1981 based on Burroughs's "The Discipline of DE".
Brion Gysin was a British-Canadian painter, writer, sound poet, performance artist and inventor of experimental devices.
The cut-up technique is an aleatory literary technique in which a written text is cut up and rearranged to create a new text. The concept can be traced to the Dadaists of the 1920s, but it was developed and popularized in the 1950s and early 1960s, especially by writer William S. Burroughs. It has since been used in a wide variety of contexts.
William Seward Burroughs II was an American writer and visual artist. He is widely considered a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodern author who influenced popular culture and literature. Burroughs wrote eighteen novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays, and five books have been published of his interviews and correspondences; he was initially briefly known by the pen name William Lee. He also collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians, made many appearances in films, and created and exhibited thousands of visual artworks, including his celebrated "Shotgun Art".
Laura Phillips "Laurie" Anderson is an American avant-garde artist, musician and filmmaker whose work spans performance art, pop music, and multimedia projects. Initially trained in violin and sculpting, Anderson pursued a variety of performance art projects in New York during the 1970s, focusing particularly on language, technology, and visual imagery. She achieved unexpected commercial success when her song "O Superman" reached number two on the UK singles chart in 1981.
The Beat Generation was a literary subculture movement started by a group of authors whose work explored and influenced American culture and politics in the post-World War II era. The bulk of their work was published and popularized by Silent Generationers in the 1950s, better known as Beatniks. The central elements of Beat culture are the rejection of standard narrative values, making a spiritual quest, the exploration of American and Eastern religions, the rejection of economic materialism, explicit portrayals of the human condition, experimentation with psychedelic drugs, and sexual liberation and exploration.
Naked Lunch is a 1959 novel by American writer William S. Burroughs. The book is structured as a series of loosely connected vignettes, intended by Burroughs to be read in any order. The novel follows the junkie William Lee, who takes on various aliases, from the U.S. to Mexico, eventually to Tangier and the dreamlike Interzone.
Naked Lunch is a 1991 surrealist science fiction drama film written and directed by David Cronenberg and starring Peter Weller, Judy Davis, Ian Holm, and Roy Scheider. It is an adaptation of William S. Burroughs's 1959 novel of the same name, and an international co-production of Canada, Britain, and Japan.
Nova Express is a 1964 novel by American author William S. Burroughs. It was written using the 'fold-in' method, a version of the cut-up method, developed by Burroughs with Brion Gysin, of enfolding snippets of different texts into the novel. It is part of The Nova Trilogy, or "Cut-Up Trilogy,' together with The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded. Burroughs considered the trilogy a "sequel" or "mathematical" continuation of Naked Lunch.
Cities of the Red Night is a 1981 novel by American author William S. Burroughs. His first full-length novel since The Wild Boys (1971), it is part of his final trilogy of novels, known as The Red Night Trilogy, followed by The Place of Dead Roads (1983) and The Western Lands (1987). The plot involves a group of radical pirates who seek the freedom to live under the articles set out by Captain James Misson. In near present day, a parallel story follows a detective searching for a lost boy, abducted for use in a sexual ritual. The cities of the title mimic and parody real places, and Burroughs makes references to the United States, Mexico, and Morocco.
John Giorno was an American poet and performance artist. He founded the not-for-profit production company Giorno Poetry Systems and organized a number of early multimedia poetry experiments and events. Giorno's creative journey was marked by collaborations, groundbreaking initiatives, and a deep exploration of diverse art forms. He gained prominence through his association with pop art luminary Andy Warhol, sparking a creative partnership that propelled his career to new heights.
Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict, or Junky, is a 1953 novel by American Beat generation writer William S. Burroughs. The book follows "William Lee" as he struggles with his addiction to morphine and heroin. Burroughs based the story on his own experiences with drugs, and he published it under the pen name William Lee. Some critics view the character William Lee as simply Burroughs himself; in this reading, Junkie is a largely-autobiographical memoir. Others view Lee as a fictional character based on the author.
And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks is a novel by Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. It was written in 1945, a full decade before the two authors became famous as leading figures of the Beat Generation, and remained unpublished in complete form until 2008.
Antony Balch was an English film director and distributor, best known for his screen collaborations with Beat Generation author William S. Burroughs in the 1960s and for the 1970s horror film, Horror Hospital.
Interzone is a collection of short stories and other early works by William S. Burroughs from 1953 to 1958. The collection was first published by Viking Penguin in 1989, although several of the stories had already been printed elsewhere, including an earlier publication titled Early Routines. The title was inspired by the International Zone in Tangiers, Morocco, where Burroughs lived for a time and by which he was greatly influenced.
The Nova Trilogy or The Cut-up Trilogy is a name commonly given by critics to a series of three experimental novels by William S. Burroughs.
Founded by poet and performance artist John Giorno in 1965, Giorno Poetry Systems is a non-profit organization where artists, poets, and musicians present the work of other artists, poets, and musicians.
Dead City Radio is a musical album by Beat Generation author William S. Burroughs, released by Island Records in 1990. The CD is a collection of readings by Burroughs set to a broad range of musical compositions. It was produced by Hal Willner and Nelson Lyon, with musical accompaniment from John Cale, Donald Fagen, Lenny Pickett, Chris Stein, alternative rock band Sonic Youth, and the NBC Symphony Orchestra, among others. It was dedicated to "Keith Haring, at the Apocalypse."
You're the Guy I Want to Share My Money With is a double album released in 1981. The album is a collaboration by Laurie Anderson, John Giorno and William S. Burroughs, recorded during their "Red Night" spoken word tour of 1981. Released through Giorno Poetry Systems Institute, the album was funded in part by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts. Most of Anderson's material came from her performance piece, United States, and live versions of some tracks, such as "It Was Up in the Mountains", would also be included in her later 4-LP release, United States Live. This was Anderson's first substantial album release, and she followed this in 1982 with her first full solo album, Big Science.
Naked Lens: Beat Cinema is a book by Jack Sargeant about the relationship between Beat culture and underground film. First published by Creation Books in 1997, the book has been subsequently republished in two different English language editions, by Creation Books in 2001 and Soft Skull in 2008. The book also features contributions from Tessa Hughes-Freeland, Stephanie Watson, and Arthur and Corrine Cantrill.
Call Me Burroughs is a spoken word album by Beat Generation author William S. Burroughs, which was released on LP by The English Bookshop, Paris, in June 1965, and then issued in the United States by ESP-Disk, New York, in 1966. Rhino Word Beat reissued the album on Compact Disc in 1995, the company's first ever reissue.