Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader (1998)

A gaunt, mannerly WASP who favored pinstripe suits (as seen in his Drugstore Cowboy cameo), Burroughs was also a heroin addict and counterculture figurehead who died in 1997 at 83. Despite smart editing, this chronological selection of his writing can't dispel the sense that the sultan of sewers was a more inspired revolutionary than writer; aside from the acerbic surrealism of Naked Lunch, his subversive spewings on American culture, homosexuality, and the drug underground tend to be more conceptual than readable. Burroughs junkies, though, will appreciate the excerpts from an unpublished novel cowritten with Jack Kerouac. B