Audiobooks by William S. Burroughs

Here is the final novel of Burroughs' Red Night trilogy, available in audio for the first time. A fascinating mix of autobiographical episodes and extraordinary Egyptian theology, Burroughs' final novel is poignant and melancholic. Blending war films and pornography, and referencing Kafka and Mailer, The Western Lands confirms Burroughs' status as one of America's greatest writers. The final novel of the trilogy begun with Cities of the Red Night and The Place of Dead Roads is a Book of the Dead for the nuclear age, an astonishing, profound, and revealing meditation on morality, loneliness, life, and death.

William S. Burroughs (Author), Ray Porter (Narrator)

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Exterminator!: A Novel

Conspirators plot to explode a train carrying nerve gas. A perfect servant suddenly reveals himself to be the insidious Dr. Fu Manchu. Science-fantasy wars, racism, corporate capitalism, drug addiction, and various medical and psychiatric horrors all play their parts in this mosaic, experimental novel. Here is William S. Burroughs at his coruscating and hilarious best. "Burroughs is the greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift."-Jack Kerouac

William S. Burroughs (Author), Paul Michael Garcia, Paul Michael Garcia, Richard Powers (Narrator)

Audiobook

Nova Express: The Restored Text

The third and final installment in Burroughs' Nova trilogy, this surrealist novel is part sci-fi, part Swiftian parody, pure Burroughs. The Soft Machine introduced us to the conditions of a universe where endemic lusts of the mind and body pray upon men, hook them, and turn them into beasts. Nova Express takes William S. Burroughs' nightmarish futuristic tale one step further. The diabolical Nova Criminals-Sammy the Butcher, Green Tony, Iron Claws, the Brown Artist, Jacky Blue Note, and Izzy the Push, to name only a few-have gained control and plan on wreaking untold destruction. It's up to Inspector Lee of the Nova Police to attack and dismantle the word and imagery machine of these "control addicts" before it's too late. **Please Contact Customer Service for Additional Documents**

William S. Burroughs (Author), Ramiz Monsef (Narrator)

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The Ticket That Exploded: The Restored Text

In The Ticket That Exploded, William S. Burroughs' grand "cut-up" trilogy that starts with The Soft Machine and continues through Nova Express reaches its climax as inspector Lee and the Nova Police engage the Nova Mob in a decisive battle for the planet. Only Burroughs could make such a nightmare vision of scientists and combat troops, of ad men and con men whose deceitful language has spread like an incurable disease be at once so frightening and so enthralling. "In Mr. Burroughs' hands, writing reverts to acts of magic."-New York Times

William S. Burroughs (Author), Ramiz Monsef (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Place of Dead Roads

From the beat generation and counterculture author William S. Burroughs comes the second novel of the Red Night trilogy, available in audio for the first time. This surreal fable, set in America's Old West, features a cast of notorious characters: the Crying Gun, who breaks into tears at the sight of his opponent; the Priest, who goes into gunfights giving his adversaries the last rites; and the Nihilistic Kid himself, Kim Carsons, a homosexual gunslinger who, with a succession of beautiful sidekicks, sets out to challenge the morality of small-town America and fight for intergalactic freedom. Fantastical and humorous, The Place of Dead Roads continues Burroughs' exploration of society's controlling forces-the state, the church, women, literature, drugs-with a style that is utterly unique in twentieth-century literature. "It's a comedy and a nightmare of Bosch-like visions, extraordinarily precise vivid visualizations, outrageous ideas like mind bombs."-Allen Ginsberg

William S. Burroughs (Author), Ray Porter (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Soft Machine: The Restored Text

In The Soft Machine, William S. Burroughs begins an adventure that will take us into the dark recesses of his imagination, a region where nothing is sacred, nothing taboo. Continuing his ferocious verbal assault on hatred, hype, poverty, war, bureaucracy, and addiction in all its forms, Burroughs gives us a surreal space odyssey through the wounded galaxies in a book only he could create. A total assault on the powers that turn humans into machines by writing and fixing our life scripts, Burroughs’ original “cut-up” book was itself rewritten in three different forms. This new edition of The Soft Machine clarifies for the first time the extraordinary history of its writing and rewriting, demolishes the myths of his chance-based writing methods, and demonstrates for a new generation the significance of Burroughs’ greatest experiment. “The voice in The Soft Machine is talking about time…[It] slips deliberately and frequently, sometimes ironically and sometimes not…rattles off elliptical allusions, throws away joke after outrageous joke, shifts gear in mid-sentence, never falters. It is precisely this voice—complex, subtle, allusive—that is the fine thing about The Soft Machine and about Burroughs.”—Joan Didion, New York Times bestselling author

William S. Burroughs (Author), Ramiz Monsef (Narrator)

Audiobook

Cities of the Red Night

From one of the founders of the beat generation and the 1960s counterculture comes this opening novel of a series available now in audio for the first time. An opium addict is lost in the jungle; young men wage war against an empire of mutants; a handsome young pirate faces his execution; and the world's population is infected with a radioactive epidemic. These stories are woven together in a single tale of mayhem and chaos. In the first novel of the trilogy continued in The Place of Dead Roads and The Western Lands, William Burroughs sharply satirizes modern society in a poetic and shocking story of sex, drugs, disease, and adventure. "Cities of the Red Night is Burroughs' masterpiece. In it, the world ends with a bang-and a barely perceived whimper, disguised by the wicked smile of one of the most dazzling magicians of our time."-Los Angeles Times Book Review

William S. Burroughs (Author), Ray Porter (Narrator)

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The Yage Letters Redux

William Burroughs closed his classic novel, Junky, by saying he had determined to search out a drug he called ‘Yage’, a drug that could be ‘the final fix’. In The Yage Letters, a mix of travel writing, satire, psychedelia and epistolary novel, he journeys through South America, writing to his friend Allen Ginsberg about his experiments with the strange drug, using it to travel through time and space and derange his senses. Burroughs’ letters reveal his desire to escape the norms of American society which hemmed him in, and the extraordinary steps he took to break free.

Allen Ginsberg, Oliver Harris, William S. Burroughs (Author), Andrew Garman, Luis Moreno, Mark Nelson (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Yage Letters

William Burroughs closed his classic novel, Junky, by saying he had determined to search out a drug he called 'Yage', a drug that could be 'the final fix'. In The Yage Letters, a mix of travel writing, satire, psychedelia and epistolary novel, he journeys through South America, writing to his friend Allen Ginsberg about his experiments with the strange drug, using it to travel through time and space and derange his senses. Burroughs' letters reveal his desire to escape the norms of American society which hemmed him in, and the extraordinary steps he took to break free.

Allen Ginsberg, Authors Various, Various, William S. Burroughs (Author), Andrew Garman, Luis Moreno, Mark Nelson, Multiple Narrators (Narrator)

Audiobook

Queer

Originally written in 1952 but not published till 1985, Queer is an enigma - both an unflinching autobiographical self-portrait and a dazzling political novel Set in Mexico City during the early fifties, Queer follows William Lee's hopeless pursuit of desire from bar to bar in the American expatriate scene. As Lee breaks down, the trademark Burroughsian voice emerges; a maniacal mix of self-lacerating humour and the Ugly American at his ugliest. Burroughs' only realist love story, Queer is a haunting tale of possession and exorcism.

William S. Burroughs (Author), Andrew Garman, Multiple Narrators, T. Ryder Smith (Narrator)

Audiobook

Queer

For more than three decades, while its writer's world fame increased, Queer remained unpublished because of its forthright depiction of homosexual longings. Set in the corrupt and spectral Mexico City of the forties, Queer is the story of William Lee, a man afflicted with both acute heroin withdrawal and romantic and sexual yearnings for an indifferent user named Eugene Allerton. The narrative is punctuated by Lee's outrageous "routines" — brilliant comic monologues that foreshadow Naked Lunch —yet the atmosphere is heavy with foreboding.

William S. Burroughs (Author), Andrew Garman, T. Ryder Smith (Narrator)

Audiobook

Wild Boys

In this funny, nightmarish masterpiece of imaginative excess, grotesque characters engage in acts of violent one-upmanship, boundless riches mangle a corner of Africa into a Bacchanalian utopia, and technology, flesh and violence fuse with and undo each other. A fragmentary, freewheeling novel, it sees wild boys engage in vigorous, ritualistic sex and drug taking, as well as prankster-ish guerrilla warfare and open combat with a confused and outmatched army.

William S. Burroughs (Author), Luis Moreno (Narrator)

Audiobook