Cities of the Red Night: A Novel by William S. Burroughs - Dystopian Fiction Book for Sci-Fi & Literary Fans - Perfect for Book Clubs and Thought-Provoking Reads

Jack Kerouac was declared King of the Beats quite prematurely, while Burroughs took longer to blossom as a writer, he surpassed anything his Beat contemporaries wrote with some of his later work. As much as a I love Kerouac's work, but as his literary alter-ego Jack Duluoz puts it in Big Sur, hes more of a "language spinner," than an "idea man." Burroughs is just so much more imaginative and visionary in his work, and I find that Cities of the Red Night has a lot in common with William Blake's later apocalyptic prophetic books. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on William Blake's influence on Kerouac and Ginsberg, and only read Cities of the Red Night after completing that thesis, but if I had read it beforehand I probably would have focused a lot more on the connections between the two Williams. Here Burroughs, like Blake, crafts a private mythology, and a narrative unencumbered by the strictures of linear time. However, there is very little use of cut-ups in this work, which despite its complexity, makes it a bit smoother of a read than Burroughs cut-up heavy works, Naked Lunch, and the Nova Trilogy. I would recommend anyone new to Burroughs start with naked lunch, but after that, I think its worth it to skip the Nova trilogy and go straight to Cities of the Red Night. There is a decent amount of gay sex, so if that's something that makes you uncomfortable than you probably won't want to read any of Burroughs work. But it's not just thrown in their for no reason as hanging, and auto-erotic asphyixiation play a major role in the mythology of the cities of the red night, and here I don't mean the book itself, but the actual cities portrayed in the text. I don't want to reveal too much, but simply put this is an amazing read, and perhaps some of Burroughs best work. I can't wait to read the second two books in the series, The Place of Dead Roads, and The Western Lands. I'm currently taking a gap year to apply to English Lit. PhD programs, but I'm already contemplating this trilogy as a subject for my dissertation.