Before his 1959 breakthrough, Naked Lunch, an unknown William S. Burroughs wrote Junk, his first novel. It is a candid eye-witness ac...
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Nov 15, 2011
Shovelmonkey1
rated it: 
Mmm mmm drugs. Yummy. Like adult smarties with extra kick and an added naughty factor.
Ok, that is not strictly true but you have to admit that sometimes it is difficult to pick your way through the troubled and varied history of drugs culture in literature. Drugs good? Drugs bad? Drugs indifferent? You're cool. Or not cool. Or an addict or a victim. See? Confusing.
Lets look back through the literature - Coleridge, De Quincey, Kerouac, Thompson and the production of wondrous dr More...
Ok, that is not strictly true but you have to admit that sometimes it is difficult to pick your way through the troubled and varied history of drugs culture in literature. Drugs good? Drugs bad? Drugs indifferent? You're cool. Or not cool. Or an addict or a victim. See? Confusing.
Lets look back through the literature - Coleridge, De Quincey, Kerouac, Thompson and the production of wondrous dr More...
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Jan 08, 2011
Kelly
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It's William S. Burroughs, dude. Made me wanna do heroin to get a grasp of what he was going through though. But to really understand his plight I would have to become a junky, which you really gotta put effort into, and I don't really wanna be a junky, because once you are you are for life. Read it, he'll tell you. Or read a bio on him or any other heroin addict. You can do it once and be okay but once you're a junky you can go 20 years without and then do it once and you're hooked or sick
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Jun 20, 2011
Cheryl
rated it: 
I think I prefer looking at this text in its original light: a sensationalized, dime-store paperback about junkies. Call me a stick in the mud, but I just can't take this type of work too seriously. I've met so many people who hail Burroughs as genius and I have yet to find out why. While he offers a grisly account of opiate addiction, it's hard for me to say that Junky is an important piece of literature. It spawned many copy cat memoirs and was influential to the genre of confessional fiction,
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Jun 03, 2010
K.D.
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This is a semi-autobiographical novel by William Burroughs (1914-1997) covering an 8-year period when he became a heroin addict. Mr. Burroughs is a "beatnik" writer. The Beat Generation is that group of American writers who came to prominence in the 1950s, and the cultural phenomena that they wrote about and inspired (later sometimes called "beatniks"). Central elements of "Beat" culture include a rejection of materialism, experimentation with drugs and alternate fo
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Jan 06, 2011
Erik
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Other than smoking some in high school and reading some books taking either a sociological or pharmacological approach to the subject, I've never had much exposure to the heroin habit. The pleasure it afforded during a week of adolescent experimentation wasn't captivating and although I've been acquainted with some habitual users, I've never been intimate with one, never lived with one. This semi-autobiographical account is the closest I've ever gotten to how it might feel to be a person with
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Feb 09, 2008
Lynn
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This could be the best anti-drug book ever written. It is certainly the odd-boy out in the Burroughs family of novels.
This is not the William S. Burroughs of The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead (Burroughs, William S.) and certainly not the same guy who wrote Naked Lunch: The Restored Text. This is a Burroughs who's not talking to himself or talking to his admirers. Instead this an author who is stretching to reach the reader with the actual smelly, lonely, desperate, empty reality of t More...
This is not the William S. Burroughs of The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead (Burroughs, William S.) and certainly not the same guy who wrote Naked Lunch: The Restored Text. This is a Burroughs who's not talking to himself or talking to his admirers. Instead this an author who is stretching to reach the reader with the actual smelly, lonely, desperate, empty reality of t More...
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Aug 13, 2007
Justin
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Perhaps to my shame as a reader, I'd never come into contact with any of Burroughs' works, with the exception that I'd occasionally catch random bits of the film Naked Lunch on the pay stations at friends' houses. At that time (circa 1996), I was far more interested in authors like Steinbeck and Hemmingway rather than fantastic tales of hallucinatory madness-I was still in the land of Cannery Row and Cuban fishermen and ill-prepared for beetle-typewriters, talking radiators and opiate-leaking p
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Mar 28, 2008
Well I had this great job and was getting in my car to go it, and my boss was calling my cell phone so I answered and said "hold on I'll be there in a second." But it was my bosses wife and she said he's been arrested, he's gone to jail, the job is canceled. So I said oh shit! So then I called my friend North of San Francisco and asked him for a job in his tree service, cutting down trees and grinding up stumps in the chipper---he said come on up! So I did...I stayed a week and a half
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Jul 15, 2008
Maureen
rated it:
No matter what title this book is given, it is a lucid account of Burrough's long walk off a short needle, and well worth reading. Whether Burroughs is describing buying junk on a New York street corner, or trying to recover from the worst hangover of his life in Mexico after eight hours of drinking tequila, he is mercilessly honest in his descriptions of his actions. Oddly, I have never gotten the feeling from reading any of Burroughs books that he celebrated heroin use, although plenty of o
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Nov 16, 2011
Tim
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This is the second book by Burroughs I've read, the first being Naked Lunch. I enjoyed this one a lot better. The writing style was similar to Dashiel Hammett strangely enough. The books details Burroughs fall into using and the drug culture. It wasn't a comfortable read because I'm needle phobic and a lot of the scenes gave me a bad case of the creeps. The brilliant turns of phrase along with the bald declarative style of narration really made the book flow well. It was a quick read being only
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Dec 15, 2008
I found a copy of Junky in the trash outside my apartment. Penguin edition, with an introduction by Allen Ginsberg I can't remember. Its previous owner had written HEROIN!!! in red bubble letters on the inside cover, and drawn several stars around the word. Seemed promising, so I read on (I can say this is the only William S. Burroughs book I have ever finished). The book moves chronologically, and you sort of follow along. You know, I would like to think if I had been a junky, I would've c
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Nov 03, 2011
Roberta
rated it:
Monkey on back
Primo libro di Burroughs, è praticamente l’unico che sia scritto in modo “normale” ovvero non sperimentale. La sua pubblicazione nel 1953 richiese molte precauzioni per evitare problemi con la giustizia (sì, all’epoca era reato anche solo parlare di droga in certe circostanze). Venne pubblicato sotto pseudonimo. Venne aggiunta un’introduzione in cui l’autore specificava di essere di famiglia borghese. Venne pubblicato dalla casa editrice insieme ad un libro sulla droga sc More...
Primo libro di Burroughs, è praticamente l’unico che sia scritto in modo “normale” ovvero non sperimentale. La sua pubblicazione nel 1953 richiese molte precauzioni per evitare problemi con la giustizia (sì, all’epoca era reato anche solo parlare di droga in certe circostanze). Venne pubblicato sotto pseudonimo. Venne aggiunta un’introduzione in cui l’autore specificava di essere di famiglia borghese. Venne pubblicato dalla casa editrice insieme ad un libro sulla droga sc More...
Jul 17, 2011
Michael
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The semi-autobiographical novel Junky follows the life of William Lee (Lee was the maiden name of William Burroughs's mother), the quintessential 1950s addict on heroine (H) and occasional consumer of methadone (M), benzedrine (benny), cocaine (C), and many others. The writing style and storyline, both rather simple, fit well original publisher, Ace Books; this publisher was catering in the 1950s to the subway riders with novelettes, detective stories, and other mass-production literature. What
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May 18, 2011
Josh
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william s burroughs most well known work is without a doubt 'naked lunch'. have you ever read 'naked lunch'? well, this slim volume, 'junky' was written in 1953, before william s burroughs got all weird. just kidding of course. he was still weird as hell but this book actually has some things like a plot, a story arc, recurring characters, and intelligible dialog...things which were largely missing from 'naked lunch'. this experimental style can make 'naked lunch' a pretty alienating experience
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Jan 23, 2011
Victoria
rated it:
Many thanks to both Josh and Carol for the priceless gift of Burroughs' most cogent work! The preface was an eerie autobiographical summary of Burroughs' life. Although no explicit connection is made between the salience of the odd details Burroughs decides to share of his life to the addiction of a junky that follows, the reader is forced to ask "Why Burroughs? Why?" Once this incipit hurdle is overcome, or more appropriately ingrained in the mind of the reader, a way of life is pr
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Dec 14, 2009
Katherine
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[He asked the question they all ask. "Why do you feel that you need narcotics, Mr. Lee?"
When you hear this question you can be sure that the man who asks it knows nothing about junk.
"I need it to get out of bed in the morning, to shave and eat breakfast."
... Junk is not a 'good kick.' The point of junk to a user is that it forms the habit. No one knows that junk is until he is junk sick.:]
"Junky" by William S Burroughs is not much o More...
When you hear this question you can be sure that the man who asks it knows nothing about junk.
"I need it to get out of bed in the morning, to shave and eat breakfast."
... Junk is not a 'good kick.' The point of junk to a user is that it forms the habit. No one knows that junk is until he is junk sick.:]
"Junky" by William S Burroughs is not much o More...
Jun 17, 2011
Benji
rated it:
It's very dry. I felt the whole thing was a list of prices and complaints that noone was paying. At the same time, the dryness of it had this normalizing effect that would wear off every 20 or 30 pages. My awareness of the horror of it would thus come in and out. Likewise, the introduction could have been a more-interesting substitute for reading the whole book--I felt like whatever interest the novel had was condensed into those 25 pages. So from then on it was hearing those same things More...
Jul 02, 2009
Nicole
rated it:
This book is an exhausting chronicle of the plight of William Lee, a heroin addict. To probably a large extent, this book is autobiographical. It gives an honest insight into the drug culture of the 1940s. It's a little hard to get through because of all the (dated) slang that is/was very specific to drug addicts. Luckily, this edition provides a glossary and a thorough introduction.
This first-person narrative recounts the day-to-day experiences and challenges involved in finding the More...
This first-person narrative recounts the day-to-day experiences and challenges involved in finding the More...
Jul 30, 2011
David
rated it:
When I first bought this book I thought it was written by the same guy that wrote Tarzan (yes they had the same last name, but that is about it). It turns out that it wasn't, and Burroughs was not a fiction writer, but rather, as the introduction to the version that I read, the father of the beat generation. However, one does wonder how he ended up becoming a writer because from reading this book one wonders how he ever actually amounted to anything.
Junky is not a book that glamourises dr More...
Junky is not a book that glamourises dr More...
Sep 05, 2010
Greg
rated it:
Something like a 'practical fiction'; Junky read in a straightforward and accessible fashion that provided a thorough insight into Burroughs' underworld, although one could question the legitimacy of this portrayal as existing much further than the extent of his own imagination.
Within these parameters, however, his world proved absorbingly vivid, and the characters were all the more memorable for their colourful depiction. As a work of fiction, it succeeded in capturing my own imagina More...
Within these parameters, however, his world proved absorbingly vivid, and the characters were all the more memorable for their colourful depiction. As a work of fiction, it succeeded in capturing my own imagina More...
Oct 19, 2011
Jim
rated it:
This is 'the definitive version of Junk', Oliver Harris's reconstruction of the original edition of Burroughs's first and arguably most accessible novel, Junkie. Harris went back to original manuscripts and their variations to piece together something that he believes is closer to WSB's original concept than either the first edition, published by Ace Books in the early 50s, a 1960s revised edition by the same publisher, or the familiar 1977 version, Junky, put together by Burroughs and James Gra
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May 07, 2010
Mika
rated it:
Hipsteri ja coolit kiksit
William S. Burroughsin omaelämäkerrallisessa romaanissa kerrotaan elämäntapanarkomaanin vaiheista lapsuudesta aina Mexico-cityn tapahtumiin, muttei vaimon kohtaloa mainita mitenkään. Kaman käyttöä ihannoidaan, ja se on nistille elämää pidentävä elämäntapa.
Kerronta teoksessa on koko ajan melko pelkistettyä muistelmatyyliä ja koko ajan etenevää. Lapsuusaika opiskeluajanjaksoineen kuitataan lyhyesti. Kirjan alkuosassa keskitytään käyttämään hu More...
Sep 14, 2011
Michael
rated it:
Junky is William Burroughs first and most accessible novel. Unlike Naked Lunch, which is written in a very surreal and abstract way, Junky reads like an actual novel with a realistic and chronological structure. It's based on Burroughs real life heroin addiction, and is about a character by the name of 'William Lee' and his doped out narrative voice, detailing his slow struggle on the razors edge of heroin addiction, dealing and withdrawal. The cold and distant narrative style is finely juxtapos
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Feb 03, 2009
Fox
rated it:
Thank you, thank you, thank you Selene!
At first I was skeptical. This book was titled Junky after all and was being recommended/lent to me by someone who had earlier reassured me that William S. Burroughs was indeed the most amoral of the altogether quite amoral beats. Beyond this, she promised, that the beats were in fact quite wary of him and his strange...ways.
Legend upon legend was repeated to me by her and pretty soon I was as intrigued by this as I was strangely d More...
At first I was skeptical. This book was titled Junky after all and was being recommended/lent to me by someone who had earlier reassured me that William S. Burroughs was indeed the most amoral of the altogether quite amoral beats. Beyond this, she promised, that the beats were in fact quite wary of him and his strange...ways.
Legend upon legend was repeated to me by her and pretty soon I was as intrigued by this as I was strangely d More...
Aug 02, 2011
Harris' introduction puts this classic novel-memoir in perspective and the other material included gave me a deeper understanding of a book I'd already read repeatedly. (However, I'm glad the deleted chapter about Wilhelm Reich and orgone energy was included after the body of the book, not inserted into it as Harris said he'd considered doing.) As the added material reveals, it was a struggle getting this published but worth it, it's Burroughs' best book--much of his later work seems pretentious
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Nov 03, 2011
Nick
rated it:
Really well done for a first novel. Basically a sociological study of the different styles of junkies (heroin addicts) in the 1950s era. There's talk of homosexual acts, but other than a random hookup or two in a bar, I didn't find anything near as detailed as is usually stated about the book. But, as you could guess from the title (interesting tidbit from the introduction: Burroughs originally wanted to call it "Junk," but the publishers changed it to "Junky" because they
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Aug 19, 2011
Kate
rated it:
I started reading this book, which was always so well acclaimed but had to stop and put it down. Its still on my bookshelf. It had an impact on me and not a good one.
Burroughs describes his addiction, but also describes his sexual exploits with young boys in third world countries. This really bothered me and I put the book down.
I'm bothered by the patriarchy associated with many "celebrated counter-culture" writers of the mid-century, who practiced the oppres More...
Burroughs describes his addiction, but also describes his sexual exploits with young boys in third world countries. This really bothered me and I put the book down.
I'm bothered by the patriarchy associated with many "celebrated counter-culture" writers of the mid-century, who practiced the oppres More...
May 12, 2011
Shalaka
rated it:
Alot of junky lingo here and there. Vivid description that was nice to read. I was vaguely intrigued by the self-destructive lifestyle of the main character Bill. I suppose the whole seriousness of drug addiction weighed down upon me throughout the entire book and any temptation I had to do party drugs out of mere curiosity was entirely erased away.As the author mentioned, "junk is not a kick, its a way of life". A horribly dependant lifestyle where any shred of self-control is entir
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Dec 21, 2010
Man, I remember freaking out over Naked Lunch as a 17 year old stoner kid. Hey, guess, what? Burroughs is actually a super-talented writer, regardless of how much he was held up as a druggy icon by my peers. And it's not like he's all "Waaahhh!!! Look how CRAZAY I am!" He's actually quite charming, lucid, and articulate, even when he's describing nasty junk withdrawal in New Orleans. I think I loved Junky so much because of the brutal realism of it. Nothing was gussied up. Even
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Aug 05, 2011
Colin N.
rated it:
In "Junky" Burroughs describes the drug use of his thinly veiled alter-ego, Bill Lee, during the late 1940s. The narrative is a straight-forward (especially compared to Burrough's more experimental later work) description of life as a junky. Lee comes from a middle-class background, becomes addicted to opiates, and wanders through America and Mexico buying and selling drugs and getting involved in low-level crime to support his habit. The book is a stark and honest portrayal of drug
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