The Guardian's Blog, page 144

The Satanic Verses: the sentence goes on

Twenty-five years after the fatwa, Salman Rushdie is safer but not safe, and speech for other writers is far from free

"I wish I'd written a more critical book." Exactly a quarter-century after the Ayatollah Khomeini threatened Salman Rushdie and "all those involved" in the publication of The Satanic Verses with death, the bravery of the author's immediate reaction is all the more impressive.

For Ian McEwan, remembering those times in 2012, the first few months were the worst:

No one knew anything. Were Iranian agents, professional killers, already in place in the UK when the fatwa was proclaimed? Might a "freelancer", stirred by a denunciation in a mosque, be an effective assassin? The media excitement was so intense that it was hard to think straight.

Hundreds dead in riots, an editor killed, a publisher shot, a translator stabbed and books burned from Bolton to Islamabad. Sometimes it's easy to forget the fatwa's human cost among the wry anecdotes of clandestine dinner parties and Special Branch minders.

Rushdie's still not sure if the struggle over The Satanic Verses has produced a clear winner, explaining to Stuart Jeffries in 2012 that "the book is still in print and the author wasn't suppressed so it was a victory in that sense. But the fear and menaces have grown."

Twenty-five years on, Rushdie says he's a "level three or four" risk now, even though the fatwa against him still appears to be in force. In the week where Penguin India withdrew Wendy Doniger's The Hindus from circulation, the anniversary reminds us that fear and menaces surround any writer who dares to "provoke the imagination".

Salman RushdieThe Rushdie fatwaCensorshipRichard Lea
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Self-publishing: is it killing the mainstream?

In genre fiction, going it alone is beginning to look a much more dependable route to success

Brenna Aubrey self-published her debut romance novel At Any Price on the Amazon Kindle on 9 December 2013. One month later At Any Price had netted a total profit of £16,588. Aubrey's success is far from unique – 2013 was a breakout year for "indie authors" led by the phenomenal success of Hugh Howey. But Aubrey is among the first in a wave of authors to do what, until very recently, would have been unthinkable; turn down a $120,000 (£72,000) deal from one of the big five publishing houses and decide to do their job herself.

"Ebooks have changed everything and the traditional publishing establishment is not quite keeping up," Brenna Aubrey answered when I asked her about some of the negative responses to her decision from traditionally-published authors. "I also think that in some ways authors who have been chasing their own dream deals take my rejection of the dream deal as a rejection of their core values and aspirations."

The six-figure deal has been the aspiration of many authors for decades. A major advance – such as the $2m deal announced for Garth Risk Holdberg – can cement a literary career. But the reality is that advances for mid-list writers are often no more than $5,000. Aubrey's deal of $120,000 was significant, but would have been split across three novels, divided with her agent and paid in instalments. When she cranked the figures Aubrey realised that – even as a debut author – self-publishing offered far more potential reward.

But it was the sticky issue of copyright that swung Aubrey towards self-publishing. "The clauses being written into contracts these days call for a reversion of rights if the yearly sales of an ebook are under a certain amount, and usually that amount is very very low." The effect of this for authors like Brenna Aubrey is that once you sign a publishing deal, you give up control of your work for up to 35 years. And three-and-a-half decades is a very long time in digital publishing.

The freedom indie authors have to market and price their own books has allowed them to dominate the digital marketplace for the last three years. As Hugh Howey observed in a typically contentious blogpost, a look at the Amazon Kindle bestseller lists in any key genre show them dominated by two kinds of writers. Established bestsellers like George RR Martin, and unknown indie writers like AG Riddle. Almost entirely absent are debut authors and mid-listers from the big five. Howey has built on this observation with the data-driven Author Earnings report, which suggests indie authors account for 39% of Kindle daily unit sales in the most popular genres of commercial fiction.

Publishers are now racing to recapture the digital ebook market from self-published authors, particularly in pivotal genres like science fiction, fantasy and romance that have proved so popular with ebook readers. New digital-only imprints like Hydra seem designed to compete in that space, but it's an open question why any author would sign deals that have been staunchly challenged by professional writers' organisations. The more natural strategy seems to be for major publishers to cherry-pick the most successful self-published authors and promote them to genuine bestseller status, as they have done with EL James and Hugh Howey. The "hybrid" author, who retains control of ebook rights while signing print-only publishing deals, may now become the new standard for publishing.

But it may be too little to late. Already this year Quercus – the successful independent publisher of Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – has placed itself up for sale citing "a lower than expected upturn in digital sales" among its reasons. It's a trend reflected across the big five publishers. Ebooks provided a much needed cash infusion for publishers struggling with a declining print market. But as the process of making backlist material available in ebook reaches completion, publishers need new bestsellers to keep their growth going. But the authors who could provide those new books, like Brenna Aubrey, are increasingly choosing to self-publish and keep both creative and financial control of their work.

FictionScience fictionFantasyRomanceSelf-publishingPublishingEbooksKindleDamien Walter
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Amazon Publishing's advances move ahead of the market

The web giant's books imprint flexes its muscles after scoring an ebook No 1, but the little guy may yet win the day

A good month for Amazon's fledgling publishing business – the imaginatively-titled Amazon Publishing – just got better, after the imprint won the rights to Cath Quinn's historical thriller The Thief Taker with a "significant advance".

Quinn has an established track record as a self-published author, selling 150,000 copies in the US and UK last year. Amazon has come out the victor in a four-way auction for her new novel of Black Death London despite admitting to Quinn's agent their "focus was on the Amazon ecosystem" as opposed to high-street bookshops, according to the Bookseller.

This demonstration of publishing muscle comes hot on the heels of Amazon's first ever No 1 ebook bestseller. William Lashner's latest novel, the Kindle-only thriller The Barkeep, topped last week's Digital Book World ebook bestseller chart with two more Amazon Publishing titles coming in at four and 11. Not bad for a company which George Packer characterises as having no real interest in books.

But why would an author who wants to break out into "the true mass market" limit herself to the Amazon universe? It seems that it's all about the future, with Amazon offering terms for digital royalties which Quinn's agent described as "decidedly more generous" than those offered by traditional publishers.

According to new figures from the self-publishing champion Hugh Howey, ebooks may account for as much as 90% of current sales in bestselling genre fiction and signing with Amazon unleashes the shopping site's "incredible ability to market their own works". Amazon Publishing puts out only 4% of bestselling genre ebooks, but those titles manage to snag 15% of daily sales. As for the big five, they're converting 28% of these titles into just 34% of daily unit sales.

The missing slice of this pie is made up of self-published novels, which Howey suggests represent a whopping 39% of ebook daily sales by volume and a quarter by value. With traditional publishers offering electronic royalties at only 25% and Amazon offering self-published authors electronic royalties at 70%, perhaps the strongest competitor Amazon Publishing will find itself up against is the idea of the author going it alone.

EbooksPublishingFictionRichard Lea
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Can happy marriage ever be interesting in books?

Open thread: Literary love affairs seldom run smooth - and the ones that do are not worth reading about. Or are they?

Guardian readers

The Hatchet Job of the Year doesn't cut it | Alex Clark

This celebration of bookish snark, won by AA Gill for his Morrissey assault, is less daring and less worthy than it thinks

It's the middle of a wet, wet winter, unaccountably you haven't shed the pounds or learnt the cello as per the optimism of 1 Jan, and to make matters even worse, Valentine's Day is just around the corner. No wonder you're feeling bilious; thank God, therefore, that there is a literary prize to match your mood.

Last night, the Omnivore's Hatchet Job of the Year award, an annual celebration of unkind book reviewing, went to AA Gill for his piece on Morrissey's Autobiography; on this scant information alone, if the prize were suddenly in need of a new name, we might reasonably suggest the Shooting Fish in a Barrel award. But more of AA presently; for now, let us leave him to enjoy his spoils, a year's supply of potted shrimp donated by The Fish Society (I think the idea is to draw a parallel between the smell of rotten fish and the smell of rotten writing; it might also be an allusion to those possibly apocryphal stories of spurned lovers sewing prawns into the spurners' curtain rods).

The Hatchet Job of the Year, previously won by critics Adam Mars-Jones and Camilla Long, is the duck/rabbit of the literary prize season. Viewed one way, what's to dislike? It takes a welcome hatpin to the balloon of literary pomposity; it declares war on the bland book review and the log-rolling backslap. The prize locates itself firmly in the traditions of seductively louche literary London – its co-sponsor is the writers' and artists' local, the Coach and Horses in Soho – in which waspish young men (usually) tell it like it is to old farts, without fear nor favour and certainly without an eye to their literary prospects or next free drink. To underline its devotion to the milieu, it is awarded at one of those properly old-school parties held in tiny rooms with lashings of cheap wine and the promise of poets to snog on the way to the night bus. Brilliant!

On that reading, the Hatchet Job is the witty icing on the delicious cake, the only problem being that there's no effing cake any more. Kicking against the pricks becomes rather less impressive when the pricks have melted away. The Hatchet Job – as all self-styled rebellions and expressions of naughtiness do – relies on the idea of a flourishing literary culture, peopled with literary colossi wielding influence with every metaphor they scrutinise, pontificating weekly in seemingly endless literary sections, dominating the stage on television arts shows, venerated across the land. Oh. Right.

In tacit acknowledgment of this sorry state of affairs, the Omnivore's manifesto promises to address precisely these problems; to reverse the decline in the quality, quantity and "relevance" of book reviewing. It has mounted, it says "a crusade against dullness, deference and lazy thinking" by shining a light on "critics who have the courage to overturn received opinion, and who do so with style".

The organisers have never really explained why dullness, deference, lazy thinking and received opinion might not thrive just as well in a negative book review as a positive one; nor why a glowing notice by a good writer should not elude these pitfalls. To do so would be to expose the fact that "hatchet jobs" are in fact far easier to write than admiring reviews; or that what they are really after is a piece of humorous, well-turned spite (and nothing too wrong with that, either).

This year's shortlist featured some excellently written and perceptive reviews, though you'd struggle to describe many of them as "hatchet jobs". Rachel Cooke's piece on Ann Widdecombe was not a favourable review, but it was more incisive pen portrait than demolition; and is it surprising to find that two high-profile novels, Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch (Peter Kemp) and Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries (David Sexton), had detractors as well as enthusiasts?

Similarly, it would have been more of a challenge – and thus more of a service to the art of book reviewing – to find a pro-Morrissey voice. Certainly, it is no great surprise to find that AA Gill hasn't much time for him, though one might have hoped that a prize-winning piece of writing would have avoided the tedious rehearsal of the Penguin Classics controversy (here's something that might have extended the argument; Morrissey's abiding penchant for releasing work on odd labels. You Are the Quarry came out on an old reggae label. Have that one for free, AA). What did I learn besides? That the writer has little time for valorising pop culture, and the stunningly original thought that Morrissey is camp. Ah, well. Morrissey made The Queen is Dead, and AA Gill has made a decent living out of writing moderately amusing broadsides against risotto. There you go: I've joined the snarkers. It doesn't feel great, but apparently it's going to save literature.

Hatchet Job of the Year awardLiterary criticismAA GillMorrisseyAdam Mars-JonesEleanor CattonDonna TarttAwards and prizesAlex Clark
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Reading speed: rate your results

A new test has cheered me up by calculating that I'm quick, but left me wondering what I miss. How do others add up?

Brilliant. Apparently I read 889 words per minute, which makes me 256% faster than the national average. Try it out: this site has been doing the rounds on Twitter, and it is fun, especially if you are competitive about how fast you read (like me).

Obviously, I don't read even nearly that quickly when I'm not trying my hardest. "If you maintained this reading speed, you could read War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy in 11 hours and 1 minute," I am told. Well, I think if I maintained that speed, my brain would combust, and I was cheating a bit … but I know I am quite fast, and I did manage to answer their questions on the text correctly. I've just taken it again, and this time I read 939 words per minute, making me 276% faster than the national average. This time, though, the extract was the start of Alice in Wonderland … so it was easy.

Reading fast is both a curse and a blessing. It means that when I get in the zone, I'm hardly aware of the words on the page, I'm just inhabiting the story … until I realise this is what I'm doing, and am jolted out into reality. But it also means, I think, that books slip out of my memory as quickly as they went in, and that I don't spend hours contemplating the beauty of a perfectly crafted sentence.

How about you? Fast or slow reader? And how (she asks, competitively) did you do on the test?

Alison Flood
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The best books on Iran: start your reading here | Pushpinder Khaneka

Our literary tour of Iran includes a clandestine autobiography under recent regimes, sharp satire and a history of revolution

My Father's Notebook by Kader Abdolah

Abdolah's autobiographical novel sees Iran's recent history through the eyes of a father and son.

Aga Akbar is a deaf and mute man who becomes a master carpet repairer. In a cave in nearby Saffron Mountain he is shown a 3,000-year-old cuneiform script, which he decides to use to express himself in a notebook.

As Akbar's son Ishmael grows up, he comes to serve as his father's ears, mouth and principal link with the world. While the father is a silent witness to events, the son becomes the protagonist.

After the shah is overthrown, and hopes of freedom are dashed under Khomeini's Islamic regime, Ishmael is increasingly involved in the underground opposition. As repression intensifies, his clandestine party is "shattered like an earthenware pot that falls to the ground" and he is forced to flee the country.

In Europe, years later, his father's notebook finds its ways into his hands. The story of both characters and their beloved Iran unfolds as the son gradually deciphers his father's cuneiform writings.

This poignant, affectionate and beautifully told tale reflects a longing for a lost homeland.

Kader Abdolah is a pseudonym created to honour two friends, Kader and Abdolah, who were killed by the regime. The author, a political exile, lives in the Netherlands and writes in Dutch.

My Uncle Napoleon by Iraj Pezeshkzad

Peseshkzad's riotous tale, set in Tehran in the early 1940s, depicts the lives of a large extended family ruled over by a despotic, deluded and paranoid patriarch, Dear Uncle Napoleon.

The novel's unnamed 13-year-old narrator has a crush on his cousin, Dear Uncle's daughter, but the dysfunctional family's personalities, politics and feuds frustrate young love at every turn.

Dear Uncle hero-worships Bonaparte, and tells extremely tall tales – backed up by his loyal manservant – of his valour in battles against Britain and its allies. As British troops land in Iran at the start of the second world war, Dear Uncle is certain that perfidious Albion, whose hidden hand he sees behind almost every event, is bent on revenge against him.

This sharp-eyed satire is highly critical of the society it portrays, sending up class snobbery, family honour, personal pride and sexual shenanigans (going to San Francisco, as a womanising uncle calls it).

The novel, first published in 1973, is one of the most popular books in Iran and has become part of the national psyche. Despite that, the mullahs banned it after the revolution, along with the immensely popular TV series it spawned.

Pezeshkzad, a former Iranian judge and diplomat, lives in France.

Revolutionary Iran by Michael Axworthy

"Iran is less a country than a continent, more a civilisation than a nation," says Axworthy at the beginning of his masterly history of the Islamic Republic. His lucid and literate account takes us from the origins of the 1979 revolution that toppled the shah and installed Ayatollah Khomeini to President Ahmadinejad's hotly disputed re-election in 2009 that brought protesters on to the streets.

Iran is a big player in the Middle East and beyond, but relations between Tehran and the west are dogged by myths and misunderstandings. The 1979 crisis, when students take US embassy staff hostage, leads "Iran into a twilight zone of diplomatic breakdown and international isolation". The country's nuclear ambitions and ongoing western sanctions do little to change that. But, as Axworthy explains, Iran has good reasons not to trust the west: among them a CIA-engineered coup that ousted an elected prime minister, support for the repressive shah, and backing for Saddam Hussein in the eight-year Iran-Iraq war.

Although no apologist for the regime – which, as he points out, imprisons, tortures and kills political opponents – the author's calm, accessible and knowledgeable narrative appeals for diplomacy and understanding.

Axworthy is an academic and a former head the British Foreign Office's Iran section.

IranMiddle East and North AfricaPushpinder Khaneka
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Stuart Hall: a class warrior and a class act

His death this week leaves a body of work that was forever alive to a forever changing world – an inspiration and an example

At a Race Matters conference in 1994 the great and good of black America's cognoscenti gathered at Princeton University to mark Cornel West's departure to Harvard. Among them were Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, the late Manning Marable, Patricia Williams and Angela Davis. When questions were invited following the opening panel the first speaker came to the mic. "Stuart Hall, the Open University," he said, by way of introduction. "The room exploded into applause," wrote Claire Alexander in a special edition of Cultural Studies in 2009. "It was the only time I have ever witnessed someone getting a standing ovation for simply saying their name."

It is hard to overestimate the intellectual influence that Stuart Hall, who died on Monday, wielded both nationally and globally. His influence on the intersection of culture and politics as well as race, gender and national identity spanned continents, disciplines and generations. Hall wore the burden of this renown lightly, as though it barely weighed on him at all. One of the most celebrated sociologists in the academy, he never wrote a standalone book (though many essays) or gained a PhD in Sociology. He was gracious, generous, approachable and accessible – secure enough in his own intellect and comfortable enough in his own skin to engage a full range of allies, admirers and adversaries without apparently considering any a threat or himself a celebrity.

Of the two things I loved most about Hall's work the first was that he was never finished. He never stopped thinking, fathoming and immersing himself in fresh thinking. Constantly applying the texts he had produced to new contexts which emerged and then adjusting his ideas to keep his ideas dynamic.

"Cultural identities come from somewhere," he wrote in Cultural Identity and Diaspora. "But, like everything which is historical, they undergo constant transformation. Far from being eternally fixed in some essentialised past, they are subject to the continuous play of history, culture and power."

Like the identities he was critiquing he was always evolving. Always challenging and being challenged. This practice was what enabled him to not only coin the term Thatcherism but also offer the most thoroughgoing analysis of it even as it was emerging. "It no longer looks like a temporary swing in the political fortunes, a short-term shift in the balance of forces," he wrote of Thatcherism in Marxism Today in January 1979, four months before MargaretThatcher was elected. "It has been well installed – a going concern – since the latter part of the 1960s. And, though it has developed through a series of different stages, its dynamic and momentum appears to be sustained."

Many of his observations in that essay, as in so many others, would prove sadly prescient. "Thatcherism" has found a powerful means of popularising the principles of a monetarist philosophy: and in the image of the welfare "scavenger" a well designed folk-devil. Even then he suggested this "crisis" might last for decades.

The second was that he was not interested in the sterile opposition to Thatcherism and its ideological cousins but in formulating the kind of response that could actually defeat it. Not only did he remain faithful to principles of equality, humanism and social justice. He held them so dear he did not want to see them sacrificed at the altar of cheap rhetoric. He was not interested in the kind of formulaic "left" responses that offered solace but no solution. "If we are correct about the depth of the rightward turn, then our interventions need to be pertinent, decisive and effective. Whistling in the dark is an occupational hazard not altogether unknown to the British left."

These two things came together to elevate him, in my estimation, above the overwhelming majority of academics of his status. He was not interested in sounding clever but being useful and making a difference. His intellectual product was not a performance but an engagement: a genuine desire to understand the world as it is, not as he would like it to be, and to help change it by offering insights and interventions that might help make that world possible.

On a personal level he was generous with both his time and his affection. He encouraged the young (including myself) without patronising or indulging. "I remember the second time I met him," recalls Ben Carrington, who was then a 28-year-old PhD candidate at Brighton University. "I reintroduced myself and told him I worked on sports, to which he replied 'I know who you are Ben, I like your work'".

In these interactions there was not just kindness but example. To be a black, left, migrant academic in Britain living through one of the most reactionary periods of the last century would be enough to embitter most. It is a rare soul who emerges from one of those categories, let alone all of them, without the myriad slights, disappointments and setbacks seeping beneath the skin, coursing through their veins and making their blood boil. But the frustrations he undoubtedly experienced did not reduce him to the kind of cynicism, rage or disaffection and sometimes all three that have left so many of his generation rightfully but redundantly embittered.

I never knew him well enough to call him a mentor (we had lunch a couple times, sat on a few panels together and met at a few conferences) and the term "role model" is too sterile. But to see a black man of his generation – of any generation – excel in the world of ideas and emerge with both his professional integrity and humanity in tact was a personal inspiration.

"I believe in an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky," wrote EM Forster. "They represent the true human tradition, the one permanent victory over cruelty and chaos"

Stuart Hall was one such aristocrat: a class warrior and a class act who had class.

In his own words:

"I thought I might find the real me in Oxford. Civil rights made me accept being a black intellectual. There was no such thing before, but then it was something, so I became one."

"Against the urgency of people dying in the streets, what in God's name is the point of cultural studies? … At that point, I think anybody who is into cultural studies seriously as an intellectual practice, must feel, on their pulse, its ephemerality, its insubstantiality, how little it registers, how little we've been able to change anything or get anybody to do anything. If you don't feel that as one tension in the work that you are doing, theory has let you off the hook."

" … identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within the narratives of the past."

"Britain is not homogenous; it was never a society without conflict. The English fought tooth and nail over everything we know of as English political virtues – rule of law, free speech, the franchise. The very notion of Great Britain's 'greatness' is bound up with empire. Euro-scepticism and Little Englander nationalism could hardly survive if people understood whose sugar flowed through English blood and rotted English teeth."

SocietyGary Younge
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Junky and William Burroughs' oblique moral vision

Its apparently impassive descriptions of a heroin addict's life still lay out rights and wrongs pretty plainly

Early on in an interview with the Paris Review, William Burroughs speaks about the process of writing Junky and his thoughts on the end results: "I didn't feel compelled. I had nothing else to do. Writing gave me something to do every day. I don't feel the results were at all spectacular. Junky is not much of a book, actually. I knew very little about writing at that time."

Personally, I read plenty of compulsion in this vivid catalogue of withdrawal and fix, scores and sales. It's a head-first and fully immersed plunge into the junk underworld, the people in it, the techniques of obtaining and taking drugs, of dodging jail and turning doctors. But perhaps we can take Burroughs at face value. Possibly he was just writing to battle boredom. After all, if you believe his account, he started taking heroin for similar reasons: "You become a narcotics addict because you do not have strong motivations in any other direction. Junk wins by default. I tried it as a matter of curiosity … "

Where I would dare to argue with Burroughs is in the notion that Junky is not much of a book. A century after his birth, 60 years after first publication, it is more than holding its own. Its sharp, specific depictions of time, places and species of humanity seem more fascinating the more they recede into the rearview mirror. His prose has dated with the style and grace of the best film noir. There's period charm to his hard-boiled prose, clipped sentences and way with plosives ("Junk is not a kick"). But this writing still bites and scratches. To give a very literal example:

The cat screamed and clawed me, then started spraying piss all over my pants. I went on hitting the cat, my hands bloody from scratches. The animal twisted loose and ran into the closet where I could hear it groaning and whimpering with fright.

"Now I'll finish the bastard off," I said, picking up a heavy painted cane …

It's apparently dispassionate, superficially funny – but essentially horrific. Burroughs walks the tightrope over these emotional chasms throughout the book, and barely puts a foot wrong. In his 1977 introduction, Allen Ginsberg wrote in his inimitable style: "It is a notable accomplishment; there is no sentimentality here, no attempt at self-exculpation but the most candid, no romanticisation of the circumstances, the dreariness, the horror, the mechanical beatness and evil of the junk life as lived."

It's good, in short. Although, of course, "good" is hardly an apposite word to use with reference to Junky. The book remains so interesting, and still repays serious reading after all these years, partly because it lays down such challenges to conventional ideas of good and bad. Aesthetically it throws the pieces in the air, suggesting all the compulsions of art and sex and pleasure are easily forgotten when you measure out your life in spoons and needles. Morally, meanwhile, it isn't for the faint-hearted. He has taken a position in the darkness beyond the conventional lines and limits. Cat torture isn't the half of it.

When Junky was first published (as Junkie), it came packaged in caveats and obfuscations to blunt the sharpness of its attack. It was sold in a back-to-back edition ("69'd," as Ginsberg neatly put it) with a book from a former narcotics agent, as if to rebalance the scales. It bore a subtitle implying moral turpitude: "Confessions of an unredeemed drug addict". It carried footnotes pointing out statements Burroughs made that weren't supported by "scientific" evidence. Its editor, Carl Solomons, also wrote a "worried introduction" (Ginsberg's phrase again) explaining: "From its very first lines, Junkie strips down the addict without shame in all his nakedness … There has never been a criminal confession better calculated to discourage imitation by thrill-hungry teens … His own words tell us that he is a fugitive from the law; that he has been diagnosed as a schizophrenic, paranoid; that he is totally without moral values."

Worried indeed. And misleading. Burroughs "own words" also tell us that he wasn't schizophrenic, even if that was how he was diagnosed. Nor is it all "calculated" to discourage imitation, as Burroughs himself explained in a letter to Allen Ginsberg:

I don't mean it as justification or deterrent or anything but an accurate account of what I experienced while I was on the junk. You might say it was a travel book more than anything else. It starts where I first make contact with junk, and it ends where no more contact is possible.

Finally, while the narrator of this book may take a very different moral position from most of us, that doesn't make it amoral. Even though Burroughs may admit to torturing his cat, that doesn't mean he approves of it. The fact that he describes it in such chilling detail might even be taken to show that he doesn't.

There's an even more upsetting scene in the book where Burroughs and a friend called Roy attempt to steal money from a sleeping "mooch". He wakes, fights back and so the narrator starts to hit him and when his friend tells him to "kick his head off", he kicks him in the side and hears his rib snap. Again, no judgement is made in the text beyond the fact that the horror of the beating makes his mouth go dry. But again, the fact that he deems the episode worthy of reporting is enough.

It's quite possible to see these scenes as, as Homer Simpson says, "just a bunch of stuff that happened". It's possible to see self-excoriation and a condemnation of Burroughs himself, or of heroin, or criminalisation. But the major force of the book suggests that the real ass is the law. Would the narrator have committed crimes without the difficulties of maintaining reliable supplies; without the stigma, isolation and pressure of the outlaw life? Junkies do terrible things out of desperation throughout the book. But the authorities do worse, almost for fun. Burroughs doesn't ask us to like addicts, but he does ask us to look at the world through their eyes and see it anew: "Kick is seeing things from a special angle."

Yes, that includes understanding that people like Burroughs have a life lived in the gutter and on the fringes. But it also helps us realise that the drug laws don't work in the interests of the average punter. At most, it becomes an all-encompassing metaphor for society and the means of control. Heroin has the narrator in its grip – but he isn't the only one who's lost control of his destiny. The outraged law is a far more dangerous, far crazier master than heroin, with few of its compensations. Is it better to accept the shackles of the status quo, or at least to live, as the narrator intends, with "momentary freedom from the claims of the aging, cautious, nagging, frightened flesh"?

The book actually has a distinct, not to mention, distinctive morality. Much of it is impossible to accept. Much of it, particularly relating to Orgone, is also daft. But Burroughs' views on the law still resonate, especially now that they are consistently backed up by scientific opinion and moving ever closer to mainstream majority opinion. It has been particularly unsettling to read this book in the week that Philip Seymour Hoffman so sadly died. It's all too easy to think that he was a victim of the same folly as Burroughs – and that Burroughs was a Cassandra-like prophet of his doom. To go back to that Paris Review quote about boredom, you might even see a moral mission in the writing of it, as well as a compulsion. When Burroughs was working on Queer, he said: "I have a duty to do these things." Junky too, might be considered a service to society.

William BurroughsFictionDrugsSam Jordison
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The Folio prize shortlist: adventures on familiar ground

The award set up to reward excellence over easy accessibility has drawn up a set of finalists bold in everything but nationalities

The idea that we might have the former head of MI5 and erstwhile Man Booker judge Dame Stella Rimington to thank for a literary prize celebrating boldness of form is as pleasingly quirky as the Folio award's first shortlist. In 2011, in angry response to Rimington and her fellow judges' professed fondness for "readability" and books that "zip along", a new, more literary literary prize was announced. It would make the Booker look not only dumbed-down but parochial, by letting in English-language fiction from all over the world; it would choose excellence above accessibility; in the words of founder Andrew Kidd, it would "not apologise for highlighting books that might at first appear daunting".

More than two years later, and the literary goalposts have moved somewhat: the Booker – where normal, higher-brow service was resumed in 2012 and 2013 – announced that this year it too would open its doors to the US and beyond, and another new award, the Goldsmiths Prize, was set up to celebrate fiction that "breaks the mould". Indeed, the first winner of that prize, Eimear McBride's A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing – a book so experimental that it languished unpublished for years, and was described in a glowing Guardian review as "quite hard to read" – appears on the Folio list too. But today's shortlist still feels fresh and significant, treading a delicate path between obviousness and obscurity.

The prize remit to find "hidden gems" sidesteps the Booker curse of always being reported for the big names that aren't there, but the choices could fuel the fears of those who worry that the Booker will henceforth be colonised by US writers: this list is overwhelmingly American. The highest-profile inclusion is leftfield short-story writer George Saunders, with McBride's novel, a fractured stream-of-consciousness account of a young woman's sexual abuse and emotional breakdown in the tradition of Samuel Beckett, the most "daunting" book.

As a whole, it's an elegantly composed list that gestures to fiction's many possibilities: as well as short stories, we have prose poetry from Anne Carson in a retelling of Greek mythology. Young tyro Rachel Kushner writes stylishly about art and revolution; old master Jane Gardam completes her acclaimed trilogy about lives remembered in advanced years. Sergio de la Pava's epic novel, originally self-published, is ragged yet brilliant, while Kent Haruf, rather like Alice Munro, is an unshowy writer who can find a universe in one small town – his books, in the words of one reader, "make you feel like a better person". Amity Gaige is another young American whose involving tale of a father who kidnaps his daughter explores intimacy and self-invention. None of these titles is predictable, but they all have weight behind them; it's just a shame that the prize doesn't range further geographically.

Folio prizeFictionGeorge SaundersJane GardamJustine Jordan
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