The Western Lands

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From the legendary author of Naked Lunch, the conclusion of his trilogy that includes Cities of the Red Night and Palace of Dead Roads

The Western Land is legendary Beat writer William S. Burrough’s profound, revealing, and often astonishing meditation on morality, loneliness, life, and death — a Book of the Dead for the nuclear age. 

“Burrough’s visionary power, his comic genius, and his unerring ability to crack the codes that make up the life of this century are undimished.” – J.G. Ballard, Washington Post Book WorldPRAISE FOR THE WESTERN LANDS:

“Among his most important books.” — The New York Times (1997)

“…seems like nothing else being published in the United States today…” –– The New York Times (1988)

“The trilogy that began with Cities of the Red Night and continued with The Place of Dead Roads is completed here, and the result is a divine comedy …a remarkable achievement …concerning the search for eternal rest that is symbolized by the Western Lands of Egyptian mythology.” — Publishers Weekly

PRAISE FOR WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS: 

“The only American novelist who may conceivably be possessed by genius.” —Norman Mailer

“Burroughs is the greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift. . . . Swift and Rabelais and Sterne accomplished a step in that direction, and Burroughs another.” —Jack Kerouac

“He’s a writer of enormous richness whose books are a kind of attempt to blow up this cozy conspiracy, to allow us to see what’s on the end of the fork . . . the truth.” —J. G. Ballard

“Burroughs was the last great avatar of literary modernism…” — Will Self

“A creator of grim fairy tales for adults, Burroughs spoke to our nightmare fears and, still worse, to our nightmare longings. . . . And more than any other postwar wordsmith, he bridged generations; popularity in the youth culture is greater now than during the heady days of the Beats.” —The Los Angeles Times Book Review
William S. Burroughs (1914-1997) was an American novelist, short story writer, satirist, essayist, painter, and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author who wrote in the paranoid fiction genre, he is considered to be “one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th century”. His influence is considered to have affected a range of popular culture as well as literature. Burroughs wrote eighteen novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays including Naked Lunch, Queer, Exterminator!, The Cat Inside, The Western Lands, My Education, and Interzone.US

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