- Joined
- Dec 12, 2021
It's a pretty mainstream book, but Brave New World. Jesus Christ.
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This shit was almost certainly the most popular fable in Europe for almost five centuries.Reynard The Fox. It's a Frankish beast fable that's quite violent and explicit. I just thought it was going to be something like
Fantastic Mr. Fox.
Everybody says they read it. Some were assigned to read it.It's a pretty mainstream book, but Brave New World. Jesus Christ.
None of his other work is very like Naked Lunch. The "Nova trilogy" that follows it is more textually experimental and non-narrative, like a 500-page modernist sci-fi poem. His "final trilogy" (Cities of the Red Night, etc.) is formally similar to NL but instead of being over-the-top satirical it's sad and nostalgic. His early work is normal fiction about drugs and faggotry, his late work is diaristic, and his essays and manifestoes are only interesting to Burroughs maniacs.
Nobody ever recommends his most NL-like thing, because it falls in a crack between his major works: The Wild Boys. You'd probably like that one, maybe also its quasi-sequels Port Of Saints and Ah Pook Is Here, and probably his shorts collections (Tornado Alley, Exterminator!, Interzone, etc.).
I've never read anything bad by Burroughs. I strongly recommend Junky and Queer. These are both early novels, with Junky's first publication being in one of those weird and largely forgotten "double novel" formats, where you had two short novels in the same paperback, and would flip it over to read the other book.
In other words, it was printed in the literary equivalent of a urinal. Those originals are priceless now.
What I like about both of these is they are actually written straight (lmao). Burroughs demonstrates incredible competence at normal narrative while focusing on the deviant lifestyle material that was his bread and butter later. Despite this, the characters are identifiable as human beings with actual personalities, and Burroughs' own charm shines through.
With a lot of alternative types, like artists who do non-representative art and writers who do stream-of-consciousness that resembles gibberish, you realize fairly quickly that they do this shit because they are completely incapable of doing anything competent, so they mask their incompetence in a sheen of supposedly avant-garde bullshit.
If you read Burroughs' early work, you realize he had a very solid grasp of narrative and conventional writing. When he deviated from the "rules" of literature, much as he deviated from the rules of normal society, he actually knew those rules, and what he was trying to accomplish by flouting them.
Also they're just really good reads.
Books of Blood is pretty gory, but I don't think they're really all that hard-hitting. "In the Hills, the Cities" in particular is very strong in "the minds eye" so to speak, but they're more fascinating than truly making you feel uncomfortable I think.
I linked it a couple of pages ago. The PDF is on archive.org.Heliogabalus or The Anarchist Crowned By Antonin Artaud is some of the most wicked shit ever. I don't consider myself an aficionado of Classical Rome by any means but even I couldn't help getting mesmerized by the story of Heliogabalus.
This novelized interpretation of the life of this Mad Emperor can only be described as a river of blood and semen.
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Oh, of course this is from Eraserhead Press during the brief Bizarro movement.Ass Goblins of Auswitz
Is about a race of creatures who resemble kids age 5-10 who one day get invaded by creatures who resemble sentient bipedal nazi asses and they torture and kill the race of kids probing them up the ass, killing them with things up their asses, feeding them shit with a tube up their asses and mostly ass stuff and nazy iconography.
Is really fucked up on the description and the idea.
I believe the author is low-key a pedophile with nazi tendencies, cause of the way he described some scenes which are somewhat erotic and disturbing about how they insert stuff up asses.
Is funny to me that the Bizarro movement never caught on in mainstream, considering how many normies like to read weird abstract outright crazy shit just for some clout on the internet.Oh, of course this is from Eraserhead Press during the brief Bizarro movement.
Got any other books?I forgot to mention this:
Vitiators
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Vitiators - Elytron Frass & Charles N. - ExPat Press
Reality and manga meld as one under the influence of a grinding meta-feud between a once beloved mangaka and his outraged fanbase. Expat Press presents Vitiators by Elytron Frass and Charles N.: a satiric metafictional atrocity in graphic novel form. Vitiators openly invites its readers to...expatpress.com
The plot is hard to describe because it runs at a mile a minute but essentially it is it's own kind of twisted meta parody of manga and Ero-Guro work. A god without balls creates evil, an author disintegrating as they write out this story, extreme gore and madness abound.
Everybody says they read it. Some were assigned to read it.
But I look around and realize,
No one really paid attention.