William S. Burroughs has 11 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 9 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.6★ across 36 ratings. The most-rated is Naked Lunch.
Naked Lunch
Summary
Naked Lunch is one of the most important novels of the 20th century, a book that redefined not just literature but American culture. This is an unnerving tale of a narcotics addict unmoored in New York, Tangiers, and, ultimately, a nightmarish wasteland known as Interzone. The restored text includes many editorial corrections and incorporates Burroughs's notes on the text and several essays he wrote over the years about the book. For the Burroughs enthusiast and neophyte alike, this is a valuable and fresh experience of this classic of our culture.
©2001 William S. Burroughs Trust (P)2009 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Junky
Summary
Burroughs' first novel, a largely autobiographical account of the constant cycle of drug dependency, cures, and relapses, remains the most unflinching, unsentimental account of addiction ever written. Through time spent kicking and time spent dealing, through junk sickness and a sanatorium, Junky is a field report from the American post-war drug underground. It has influenced generations of writers with its raw, sparse and unapologetic tone.
©2012 William S. Burroughs (P)2012 W.F. Howes
Queer
Summary
For more than three decades, while its writer's world fame increased, Queer remained unpublished because of its forthright depiction of homosexual longings.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 '40s, 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.
©2010 The William S. Burroughs Trust, 2010 Oliver Harris (introduction) (P)2013 Recorded Books
Cities of the Red Night
Summary
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.
©2013 William S. Burroughs (P)2016 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
The Western Lands
Summary
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.
©2016 William S. Burroughs (P)2016 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Exterminator!
Summary
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.
©2016 William S. Burroughs (P)2016 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
The Yage Letters Redux
Summary
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.
©2006 The William Burroughs Trust, The Allen Ginsberg Trust, Introduction Copyright by Oliver Harris (P)2013 Recorded Books
The Place of Dead Roads
Summary
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 20th-century literature.
©1983, 2013 William S. Burroughs (P)2016 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
The Ticket That Exploded: The Restored Text
Summary
In The Ticket That Exploded, William S. Burroughs' grand "cut-up" trilogy, which 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.
©1962, 1964, 1967 William S. Burroughs. Introduction © 2014 by Oliver Harris (P)2016 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
The Soft Machine: The Restored Text
Summary
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.
©1961, 1966 William S. Burroughs. © 2014 by the Estate of William S. Burroughs. Introduction © 2014 by Oliver Harris (P)2016 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Nova Express: The Restored Text
Summary
The third and final installment in Burroughs' Nova trilogy, this surrealist novel is part-sci-fi, part-Swiftian parody, and 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 NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your Library section along with the audio.
©2011 William S. Burroughs (P)2016 Blackstone Audio, Inc.