The western lands
Burroughs's eagerly awaited final novel in the trilogy begun with Cities of the Red Night and The Place of Dead Roads is a profound, revealing, and often astonishing meditation on mortality, loneliness, nuclear peril, and the inextinguishable hope for life after death.
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3recommend
9mentions
5people
2015–2025years
44% recommend56% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- All great books but missing some important items:
- Candide
- A Peoples History...
- Manufacturing Consent
- Dharma Bums
- Naked Lunch/Western Lands
- Infinite Jest
- Something Thompson, Campaign Trail '72 maybe.
- Don't believe what the article says about a "disjointed, almost illegible narrative". The Naked Lunch a very good approachable book. Also the movie captures it about as well as a film could.
The real cut up books are The Nova Trilogy, and (although I did read all 3 when I was younger) they are quite a trial.
I also enjoyed "Queer" and "Junkie" which are often not counted as part of his ordinary canon of work (the former was written first and published only posthumously). They're both biographical of course, and approachable. Later in life he wrote The Western Lands which is a fairly straightforward biography, and worth reading.
- I'm an old man now, so I'm especially interested in books about getting complete with life. I'm also into amusing and distracting.
Top on my list are William S. Burroughs' last trilogy (especially Place of Dead Roads and The Western Lands) and Matthew Stover's Caine series (especially Caine Black Knife and Caine's Law). Burroughs published that trilogy when he was about my age, and there's some amazing stuff about how memory shows up. The Caine series is basically a contemplation of "What if you could undo the worst thing that you've ever done?".
I could go on about many other authors whom I've loved, over the years, but there's other stuff that I gotta do now.
- For a different perspective, I recommend The Western Lands by William S. Burroughs.
- "A rule that is almost always valid: never refute or answer a critic, no matter how preposterous the criticism may be. Do not let the critic teach you the cloth, as they say in bullfighting circles. Never charge the cloth, even if the critic resorts to actual misquotation."
-- William S. Burroughs, "The Western Lands"
- "Hurry up, please. It's time."
William S. Burroughs, Western Lands, 1987
He lived another decade, however.
