A strange compelling work which has become a cultural touchstone (for example, the last book prosecuted for obscenity in the US). Burroughs may be an acquired taste, but the man was also a genius.

In fact this book was a work of collaboration. Kerouac and Ginsberg pulled this book together, taking a messy stained pile of papers and jamming them together into some sort of structure. Not everyone agrees that there is structure, or meaning, or genius to be found here. I suggest they read it several more times.

Some of Burroughs's notions, such as language is a virus, and systems of control at work in society, are becoming even more relevant each year.

"Naked Lunch" is not to be read. It is to be tasted.
Swallow this juicy pulp of blood, shit, vomit and sweat and feel it explode in your stomach as you lick your lips with the wicked smile of a gourmet: Willy the Disk, Bradley the Buyer, Doc Benway, Pantopon Rose will help your digestion. Beware though: Mary's friend is joining the party. His name is Steely Dan, and he's dying to be introduced... literally.

*** Bon appétit. ***

Welcome to the Interzone, where nothing is real and everything is possible.
Hybrid, mutant, protean creatures taking shape from junk-induced nightmares of withdrawal; sadistic medical experiments; obscure political plots; depraved policemen chasing delirious junkies in the streets of this no-man's land of terror and mayhem, in which the addiction of the body walks hand in hand with the mind gone astray...
Naturally this is just the beginning.

Don't look for any logic in this novel: "Naked Lunch" celebrates the death of the novel. There's no way out of here. Delve into the filth, breathe the smell of these rotting bodies and taste the flavour of these revolting pages without looking back.
No meaning, no plot, no direction. Get rid of your rationality and feast on the most graphic of books with all your senses. You'll find yourselves floating in a revolting mud of nightmarish, violent, grotesque visions of chaos and abandonment, a hellish geography of madness, a 'Terra Incognita' between the Algerian casbah and a painting by Hieronymus Bosch. You'll start feeling at home. Too late to walk away, guys... the Mugwamps are going to get you...

Burroughs' novel is wittier than this though. The (artistically) graphic side is only part of it.
"Naked Lunch" is also a ferociously sly satire of its time. The political climate of the late 50s (McCarthy's crusade, the power and ambition of the CIA going out of control, the exploitation of social hysteria) is mercilessly ridiculed and unravelled. Doc Benway, the depraved scientist who plays with his patients' minds and bodies; the corrupted narcs and police informers; the undetermined political plots are important factors that can't be ignored when it comes to judging Burroughs' work. They're possibly the main source of inspiration of the book, as the events of the late 60s triggered Ballard's paranoia in "The Atrocity Exhibition".

This book is not for anyone. Erotic hangings, obscure rituals, tons of junk, fluids and feces and self-mutilation are definitely not for anyone. But they're just the means to convey a deeper meaning.

"Naked Lunch" is the hilariously terrifying masterpiece of an insane genius, the man who murdered literature and did unthinkable things to its corpse.

By reading this book you become his accomplice.

Well.. this is definitely not your average book. This shit is crazy. I read it without much of a backhanded thought or opinion about it. Saw it in the library, knew that it was some sort of explicit, censured, obscene kind of work, and got it as a guilty pleasure read for myself.
It is obscene without much of an explanation, and so scattered and logic-less that any attempt to draw a line of continuousness among the stories is to no avail.
Yet, it struck me for some reason.
I didn’t like it in the prepositional way, nor I think of it as a groundbreaking work. But.. there’s something in there.
Maybe it’s the drugs that got me rambling.

A lot of my friends say "this book doesn't make any sense". I disagree, it makes perfect sense. Just because it doesn't have a standard linear plot, and it consists of unrelated vignettes, sometimes written in the stream of consciousness style. That doesn't make it unintelligible.

You've got to work at it to get the most out of this book. I've read it three times now, and it gets better each time.

It's not his best book. But far superior to his three previous books: Junkie, Queer, and The Yage Letters.

I guess killing his wife, and consuming large amounts of ayahuasca, had a big impact on him.

There are some crazy scenes in this book. Talking assholes, surgical procedures performed in unsanitary conditions, and candirus released into swimming pools.

It's so dark and disturbing I love it

A dauntingly iconic book with a history as interesting as the novel itself. While reading this mostly feels like hard work, I can't say that I've read anything similar before.



Naked Lunch is a novel told in the form of vignettes loosely following the drug-addict William Lee as he navigates from the US to Mexico over to Tangier and the dreamlike Interzone. On his travels he meets the strangest of people and we as readers get to witness how dark and twisted being human can really be.

Reading this feels like work, but the devil is in the details. If you like a plot or generally appreciate an intuitive structure, you'll have to look elsewhere. Burroughs apparently intended the reader to be able to read the chapters in any given order, so it took me a while finding my way into this narrative. Burroughs style of writing feels both spontaneous and meticulous though and paying attention pays off: there's both humour and wit in the absurd scenarios.

Don't do drugs, kids. Once I realised that this was a cautionary tale, everything started to make sense. Burroughs, who not only has crazy myths and stories attached to his name (apparently he worked as a bug exterminator in Chicago at one point and was notorious for keeping a ferret and a loaded gun in his room when studying English literature and Mayan archaeology at Harvard), but also a drug-loaded past. As someone who claims to have expertise in pretty much every drug out there, he equally knows about all the terrors and horrors associated with being dependent on substances. It gives an entirely new context to what you're reading here – it's not someone who just tries to create the grossest and most provocative scenarios for the sake of it, it's someone who's inviting you to peek into the hell he's been to.

I'm most definitely glad to having read this – it's rich and full of all sorts of things. In many ways it felt like work to navigate myself through this world, but a book so unique in its history and execution definitely feels like an adventure.

In that regard, also thanks to to my reading buddy Leonard to share this experience with me!

This book is not easy to read if your idea of reading is that it has a linear plot, characters that are either good, bad or somewhere in between, spirit-uplifting narratives and dialogues and inspiring theme.

This book has none of those. Yet, this is one of the best-written books that I've ever read. Reading this was just a different experience: you don't know where Burroughs would take you every time you lift the page, you don't know who would appear as the characters and what they would say or do, you don't know how he could write with brilliant originality and fluidity. It is like being taken for a ride but you know that the ride would be simply a memorable one because you gasp as you go through each line of this book.

Yes, it is about drugs (marijuana, heroin, morphine), sex, crime, pedophilia, sadism and all the monstrosities that you can think of as a normal human being. But think Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (5 stars), Hubert Selby, Jr.'s Last Exit To Brooklyn (4 stars), Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange (4 stars), J.G. Ballard's Crash or even Maquis de Sade's monumental The 120 Days of Sodom. Their subjects are all monstrous but the writings are unparalleled and unequaled. This is postmodern and thus hard to understand. The trick is for you to just read and let the words wash over you and somewhere in the middle of your reading you will start to get the drift until you find yourself marching with the grove and then you will find it unputdownable.

The plot is fragmented that makes it not really a plot but a collection of short stories or even hallucinations (there is no story, like your "typical" story). It has some characters that appear in more than one instance like the Agent William Lee, the pirate AJ or the doctor Benjay. But their characters are not developed just like in most novels. You just have to take them as they are. There is also some kind of political undertones in some of the stories that reminded me of George Orwell's 1984 (4 stars) but it feels like just a side dish and not the main course. Being an artist belonging to the Beat generation, this book also reminded me of Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

This book also surprised me a bit: it is rare that I like a book with zero relatability to me. I mean, I had no experience whatsoever with any prohibited drugs and still I found this book amazing. It used to be that I would only like books that speak to me. Maybe my literary taste is maturing since I am in my fourth year of voracious reading. Thank you, Goodreads.

My second Burroughs and he is still to disappoint. In fact, he, for me, is one of the best American novelists. Simply amazing work here.

My GOODNESS, what a crazy ride this was. I had no clue where reality ended and his waking (sort of?) Dream State began. A wonderful befuddlement.

No one writes like this man. Certainly, not a book for everyone, but I wouldn't feel complete without this one in my Read pile.

Naked Lunch is a symphony of smut; a fever-dream of filth; a hallucination; a work of art. This is not a novel that charts an easy course. It is wild, erratic, crude to the extreme, and largely incomprehensible but for occasional moments of clarity. There is genius in these naked pages, a raw and fractured genius, the voice of the depraved and drug-addled, mainlined, unfiltered, directly into the vein. This lunch is opulent, sumptuous, but excessive, tainted, vomit-inducing. Burroughs's masterpiece is certainly an experience, though not a pleasant one.

frankly it's the Beats that make me fear men's minds the most.

I shot heroin for a decade, and at the time, I had this wrongful solidarity towards the culture and arts that surrounded it.

My first exposure to Burroughs was the novel Junky - a trashy pulp book with a thin plot. Even at 19, a period when starring at my tennis shoes for multiple hours at a time entertained me, I found no enjoyment from this man's prose.

Fast forward about 6 years, I'm in the middle of a long federal prison stretch, my literary receptors have become more pronounced. I'm getting through long-winded books like Infinite Jest, War and Peace, etc.
And still interested in drug literature, although not finding much with any artistic merit.

I like some of the Beat literature, Kerouac's On the Road and Big Sur were enjoyable. I've always been told that Burroughs was the most influential, seminal, and avant-guard of the mix.

I read Naked Lunch and detested it for many reasons, namely the fragmentary style, which I know was from the cut-up thing. There was some genius writing but it was much too few and far between.

I'm heterosexual and didn't like the pornographic gay imagery sprinkled between the drug stuff. I can handle this kind of content if it functions correctly in a work, Hubert Selby jr. comes to mind.

But when you have some nauseating non-linear incoherency and then throw in these graphic and pointless sex scenes, it makes you feel nothing.

If a work of art is just shock value, if the only emotion it can evoke is confusion, then the writer has accomplished nothing; just an esoteric puzzle, people can falsely intellectualize to try and sound sophisticated to other people.

I read this in a prison cell. I had no distractions, I tried to interpret it a million different ways and have only come to one understanding: this is like a bad homosexual acid trip, if you are into bad homosexual acid trips that don't make sense, you should definitely check it out.

There were moments while I was reading this brilliant novel in which my jaw was to the floor. I did not know whether I should be puking or laughing. If you enjoy the strange, disturbing, and blackly humorous, then "Naked Lunch" is the novel for you! It has all of these elements at their most extreme. Burroughs' masterpiece is, of course, not for everyone. While reading it, i was actually shocked at how acclaimed it was. Not because it was at all bad (because this is, indeed, a well written, hilarious, and strangely intriguing work of art), but because of how disgusting and shocking it was. I can only imagine reading this in 1959! This trashy, gross, yet entertaining novel is one of the greatest, darkest satires in literary history, and a work so disturbing and (successfully) edgy that it ranks with the works of de Sade as one of the most unbelievably explicit and wild masterpieces in all of literature. Warning: not only is this book vivid in its depiction of various unspeakable actions (rape, hardcore substance abuse, pedophilia, sexual violence, etc.) it's also really difficult to understand. There's no plot, it's mostly a series of oddball vignettes filled with colorful descriptions, and in order to understand it you have to accept the fact that you will never really understand it, because Burroughs isn't the type of writer to be understood. He's just the type of writer to either admire or despise, so those willing to dive into his works must be prepared for not only some of the grossest, scariest experiences of your literary life, but also for some of the most confusing writings ever recorded.
Yeah, I think I need to read this one again sometime...

Glenn Russell ---
Speak to us straight about your Lunch that’s bare
Twisted, dirty and anything but fair.
Your words like needles sticking in our veins
As you write of dopefiends, coke bugs and dames.

William S. Burroughs ---
Rube, the word we use in this world is junk
You’ll hear straight without funny stuff or funk.
Read the damn book; I have nothing more to add
For embellishing perfection has never been a fad.

This is a one-of-a-kind novel. Couldn't help myself with the Alexander Pope-style heroic couplets since Burroughs is at the extreme opposite end of the literary spectrum from the great Alexander Pope, and that's understatement!