Contributors:

Oliver Harris, the author of William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination, is a professor of American literature at Keele University. He is the editor of The Letters of William S. Burroughs, 1945–1959, “Everything Lost”: The Latin American Notebook of William S. Burroughs, and Burroughs’ novels, Junky: The Definitive Text of “Junk” and The Yage Letters Redux. Harris is also the author of numerous scholarly articles on Burroughs, the Beat Generation, film noir, and the epistolary form.

Ian MacFadyen has written about William S. Burroughs in a number of essays, including “Machine Dreams: Optical Toys and Mechanical Boys” in the collection  Flickers of the Dreamachine. His other work includes Ira Cohen’s Photographs: A Living Theatre  and The Blood of the Poet: Lorca and the Duende.

“Without William there is nothing. . . . Burroughs alone made us pay attention to the realities of contemporary life and gave us the energy to explore the psyche without a filter. . . . He is the brave fool (and he was no fool) who told us what is—was—could be.”—Lou Reed

“I can think of no other work of literary criticism that brings together such a multiplicity of artists, practitioners and critics in such a dynamic assembly of writing forms. The resulting symbiosis strikes me as a whole new critical form, utterly pertinent to Burroughs’ milieu.”—Michael Hrebeniak, author of Action Writing: Jack Kerouac’s Wild Form