'As filthy and boggling as it was in 1968 -- would he get away with it today?' Time Out 'The fold-in technique gives excellent comic and satiric results!cleverly combines the raw energy of lowbrow spy- and science-fiction with the brutal unfamiliarity of hardcore pornography.' Spectator 'He has a savage sense of comedy and a cleverly educated ear for the haunting casual phrase.' Scotsman 'In Mr Burroughs's hands, writing reverts to acts of magic, as though he were making some enormous infernal encyclopaedia of all the black impulses and acts that, once made, would shut the fiends away forever.' New York Times 'His Swiftian vision of a processed, pre-packaged life, a kind of electro-chemical totalitarianism, often evokes the black laughter of hilarious horror.' Playboy Praise for William Burroughs: 'Burroughs is the greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift.' Jack Kerouac 'Burroughs' voice is hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American, a voice in which one hears transistor radios and old movies and all the cliches and all the cons and all the newspapers, all the peculiar optimism, all the failure.' Joan Didion 'The only American novelist who may conceivably be possessed by genius.' Norman Mailer 'In the English language, William Burroughs is the greatest writer alive. His imagination has tackled head-on the post-war world, with its huge bureaucracies and sinister complexes. He has a paranoid vision, but as he himself said: the psychotic is someone who knows what's really going on.' J. G. Ballard, Sunday Times 'William Burroughs broadened people's conception of what makes humanity. In that way, he really was an American hero, a hero writer, and also just a great man.' Lou Reed

William Burroughs was born in St Louis, Missouri in 1914. Immensely influential among the Beat writers of the 1950s -- notably Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg -- he already had an underground reputation before the appearance of his first important book, 'Naked Lunch'. Originally published by the daring and influential Olympia Press (the original publishers of Henry Miller) in France in 1959, it aroused great controversy on publication and was not available in the US until 1962 and in the UK until 1964. The book was adapted for film by David Cronenberg in 1991. William Burroughs died in 1997.