Full name: The Adding Machine: Selected Essays

Author: William S. Burroughs Year: 1985 Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: Essays, Non Fiction Purchase/reserch links: LibraryThing Goodreads Amazon ISBNs: 9781559702102 1559702109

Acclaimed by Norman Mailer more than twenty years ago as "possibly the only American writer of genius," William S. Burroughs has produced a body of work unique in our time. In these scintillating essays, he writes wittily and wisely about himself, his interests, his influences, his friends and foes. He offers candid and not always flattering assessments of such diverse writers as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Samuel Beckett, and Marcel Proust. He ruminates on science and the often dubious paths into which it seems intent on leading us, whether into outer or inner space. He reviews his reviewers, explains his famous "cut-up" method, and discusses the role coincidence has played in his life and work. As a satirist and parodist, William Burroughs has no peer, as these varied works, written over three decades, amply reveal. Similar books: Wormholes by John Fowles The Source of Self-Regard by Toni Morrison Signposts in a Strange Land by Walker Percy Changing My Mind by Zadie Smith Known and Strange Things by Teju Cole The Way the World Works by Nicholson Baker Quarrel & Quandary by Cynthia Ozick The Rub of Time by Martin Amis Loitering by Charles D'Ambrosio In Favor of the Sensitive Man by Anais Nin Where the Stress Falls by Susan Sontag On Looking by Lia Purpura The Size of Thoughts by Nicholson Baker At the Same Time by Susan Sontag When I Was a Child I Read Books by Marilynne Robinson The Cross of Redemption by James Baldwin My Ears Are Bent by Joseph Mitchell The Other Glass Teat by Harlan Ellison Sleepless Nights in the Procrustean Bed by Harlan Ellison Just Enough Liebling by A. J. Liebling