8vo. 182 pp. Black cloth in dustjacket with slight wear at spine ends, overall a fine copy, signed by Burroughs on the title page and with an additional signed sticker bookplate affixed to the ffe.
Originally published in Paris by the Olympia Press in 1961, of this first book in Burroughs' Nova Trilogy, Joan Didion wrote: "Burroughs voice is hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American, a voice in which one hears transistor radios and old movies and all the clichés and all the cons and all the newspapers, all the peculiar optimism, all the failure. . . . It is precisely this voice–complex, subtle, allusive—that is the fine thing about The Soft Machine and about Burroughs.”
The densely poetic, abstract prose of The Soft Machine is an enigmatic display of Burroughs’ talent, and his ability to channel the vast frontiers of his consciousness. The Soft Machine has been variously compared with Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake—both for being a profoundly challenging read, as a masterful achievement in Burroughs’ development of a vernacular style of storytelling all his own.
The Soft Machine is also an artifact of a particularly momentous period of productivity and artistic growth Burroughs undertook during his time in France. Much of The Soft Machine was completed at the Beat Hotel in Paris, and the heavy influence of Brion Gysin (whose asemic calligraphy adorns the dust jacket) is evident through the cut-ups from which it was compiled, as is the influence of French poetry, notably Rimbaud, Lautréamont, and Saint-John Perse, the Dadaists and Surrealists.
A fine twice-signed volume from the primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th century." (2003 Penguin Modern Classics edition of Junky)
8vo. 182 pp. Black cloth in dustjacket with slight wear at spine ends, overall a fine copy, signed by Burroughs on the title page and with an additional signed sticker bookplate affixed to the ffe.
Originally published in Paris by the Olympia Press in 1961, of this first book in Burroughs' Nova Trilogy, Joan Didion wrote: "Burroughs voice is hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American, a voice in which one hears transistor radios and old movies and all the clichés and all the cons and all the newspapers, all the peculiar optimism, all the failure. . . . It is precisely this voice–complex, subtle, allusive—that is the fine thing about The Soft Machine and about Burroughs.”
The densely poetic, abstract prose of The Soft Machine is an enigmatic display of Burroughs’ talent, and his ability to channel the vast frontiers of his consciousness. The Soft Machine has been variously compared with Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake—both for being a profoundly challenging read, as a masterful achievement in Burroughs’ development of a vernacular style of storytelling all his own.
The Soft Machine is also an artifact of a particularly momentous period of productivity and artistic growth Burroughs undertook during his time in France. Much of The Soft Machine was completed at the Beat Hotel in Paris, and the heavy influence of Brion Gysin (whose asemic calligraphy adorns the dust jacket) is evident through the cut-ups from which it was compiled, as is the influence of French poetry, notably Rimbaud, Lautréamont, and Saint-John Perse, the Dadaists and Surrealists.
A fine twice-signed volume from the primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th century." (2003 Penguin Modern Classics edition of Junky)