NakedLunch

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Naked Lunch is a novel based on William S. Burroughs drug-influenced visions. There's also a movie.

It does not have a recognizable plot, so you must read it like a dream sequence. Images may have meaning, or maybe they are just distraction.

Example (picked at random):

: The Chief of Police is a Chinese who picks his teeth and listens to the denunciations presented by a lunatic. Every now and then the Chinese takes the toothpick out of his mouth and looks at the end of it. Hipsters with smooth copper-colored faces lounge in doorways twisting shrunk heads on gold chains, their faces blank with an insect's unseeing calm.

As the example shows, the writing is brilliant and evokes shifting images at a breathtaking rate.

If you enjoyed Naked Lunch, I would recommend The Recognitions, by William Gaddis. The Recognitions is slightly more structured, but only slightly. -- PhilEhrens

: Some of the "hellride" sequences in Zelazny's (in)famous Amber books are better. -- Steve

Hmm, would it be appropriate to move this to BookShelved:NakedLunch? We seem to be only using this page as a metaphor for incoherence, so I'm not entirely convinced it's on-topic. -- MartinHarper

The old logs show the following:

NakedLunch 2002-09-06T21:15:03 pD9531919.dip.t-dialin.net *
NakedLunch 2002-09-06T21:25:50 AlexSchroeder/dclient217-162-239-98.hispeed.ch quote, category
NakedLunch 2003-01-26T03:34:12 PhilEhrens/inferno.slug.org *
NakedLunch 2003-01-26T03:34:42 PhilEhrens/inferno.slug.org *

That first one might have been Pache, Hermann, Waldmann, Konnertz, or others (but not Manzel; it predates his arrival); a little bit of searching doesn't yield any clues.

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NakedLunch

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