Queer
About this audiobook
“A major work, Burroughs’s heart laid bare, the origin of his writing”—Allen Ginsberg
The definitive text of William S. Burroughs’s early, long-unpublished novel, reissued on the seventieth anniversary of the year of its writing, now adapted for film directed by Luca Guadagnino and starring Daniel Craig
Originally written in 1952 but not published till 1985, Queer is a haunting tale of possession and exorcism. Both an unflinching autobiographical self-portrait and a coruscatingly political novel, it is both Burroughs’s only realist love story and a montage of comic-grotesque fantasies that paved the way for his masterpiece, Naked Lunch.
Set in Mexico City during the early fifties, Queer follows William Lee, the protagonist of Burroughs’s debut novel Junky, a man afflicted with acute heroin withdrawal and romantic yearnings for Eugene Allerton. As Lee breaks down over the course of his hopeless pursuit of desire from bar to bar in the American expatriate scene, the trademark Burroughsian voice emerges, a maniacal mix of self-lacerating humor and the ugly American at his ugliest.
Now a cult classic and a highly regarded part of his oeuvre, reissued on the seventieth anniversary of the year of its writing, this edition of Queer features a contextualizing introduction by the eminent Burroughs scholar Oliver Harris.
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About the author
William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) was an American author, painter, and spoken-word performer who has had a wide-ranging influence on American culture. Jack Kerouac called him the “greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift.” Norman Mailer declared him “the only American writer who may be conceivably possessed by genius.” A postmodernist and a key figure of the beat generation, he focused his art on a relentless subversion of the moral, political, and economic conventions of modern American society, as reflected in his often darkly humorous and sardonic satire. He wrote eighteen novels and novellas, six short-story collections, and four collections of essays.
Oliver Harris, a British academic and professor of American literature at Keele University in Staffordshire, England, is the author and editor of numerous books, including works by William S. Burroughs and two series, the D. C. Belsey and the Elliot Kane mysteries.
T. Ryder Smith is a narrator whose audiobook readings have won the prestigious Audie Award for best narration as well as several AudioFile Earphones Awards. As an award-winning actor, he has appeared on Broadway in Equus and in many off-Broadway shows including Passion Play, Dead Man’s Cell Phone, and Lebensraum, for which he won a Drama Desk Award. He has also made numerous television appearances on series such as Nurse Jackie, Blue Bloods, Law & Order: SVU, and others.
Andrew Garman is a television, film, and voice actor. His acting credits include the film Julie & Julia and appearances the television series Law & Order, Mercy, and Conviction. Among his audiobook narrations are Arcadia by Lauren Groff, Simply from Scratch by Alicia Bessette, and Love Is a Canoe by Ben Schrank, among others.
