William S. Burroughs Collection

Ever wondered about the "outlaw" author behind such transgressive classics as Naked Lunch (1959), The Wild Boys (1971), and Queer (1985)? Now you can explore the wide range of writings produced by queer author William S. Burroughs (1914-1997) thanks to a generous donation by Londoner Mike Niederman. Included in the Burroughs Collection are novels, essays, interviews, biographies, and audio tapes. His fiction is celebrated for its hallucinatory imagery, surrealistic satire, sadomasochistic subversiveness, and brilliant mimicry of the speech and thought patterns of junkies, criminals, hipsters, and other outsiders. "Language is a virus from outer space," he once declared, neatly summing up his pulp-fiction sense of discourse as a power strangely alien to human will.