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“... was also important. Acker was a charismatic live reader, and followed the example of her hero, William Burroughs, by touring clubs and music venues, building fans among people who didn’t usually buy books. Transgression too was important for such an audience, transgression and a sense of lineage with other transgressors, a secret club for fans to ...”

“... bad-trip imagery, like the cut-up technique Bowie used to compose the lyrics, is borrowed from William Burroughs. The title song is introduced with a toe-curling yell of: ‘This ain’t rock’n’roll, this is genocide!’ But that’s soon forgotten in the gloriously overlong, overripe, decadent mess of anarchic guitars, squelching horns and ...”

“... television. It is true that a number of influential mavericks – from Nabokov and Henry Miller to William Burroughs, James Baldwin, Philip Roth and the Beats – had been chipping away at the old taboos. But it still took courage to challenge the stultifying pieties of middlebrow culture. Being a woman didn’t help. (Does it ever?) Over the course of an ...”

“... When she goes to Colorado, in 1975, she makes sure we know that it is the poets, Ginsburg, Burroughs, Corso and Anne Waldman, who give the smartest parties. She tells us twice that ‘aboard an almost empty 747 home from New York I joined the mile-high club’ – presumably made up of those who, having already seen the in-flight movie, make love in ...”

“... After working​ on his film adaptation of William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (1991), David Cronenberg apotheosised both the writer and himself by claiming his screenwriting and Burroughs’s literary style had synergised. Cronenberg apparently mused that were Burroughs to die he might write his next novel ...”

“... The future isn’t what it used to be. In one of William Gibson’s first published stories, ‘The Gernsback Continuum’, a photographer is assigned to capture examples of ‘futuristic’ American design from the Thirties, the kind of dream architecture that graced the covers of pulp science fiction magazines like Amazing Stories ...”

“... valiantly kept up with new writers: Doris Lessing, Margaret Drabble, Sylvia Plath, Norman Mailer, William S. Burroughs. A James Baldwin novel, she wrote to Larkin, quoting the publishers’ blurb, was indeed ‘powerful’. She thought it ‘a very well-written book, but so upsetting – one is really glad never to have had ...”

“... Fin-de-siècle periodicals like the Yellow Book, the Chameleon and the Savoy took inspiration from William Morris, Charles Ricketts and other luminaries of the Arts and Crafts movement, favouring medieval typefaces, elaborate woodcut illustrations, uncut pages and plenty of white space. An equivalent international vogue for ‘ephemeral bibelots’ was ...”

“... take note: tough-guy-hipster-fedora-favourers – Al Capone, Humphrey Bogart, J. Edgar Hoover, William S. Burroughs, Frank Sinatra, Johnny Depp – might all be considered unwitting imitators of Sarah Bernhardt.) 5. The Rampant (er … ) Erotomania. (One moment, Herr Doktor – cough cough – my throat is tickling ...”

“... invited him to his home in Worcester. There, Fisher saw for the first time the work of the later William Carlos Williams, Basil Bunting, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, Louis Zukofsky, Robert Creeley, Charles Olson and others. ‘I’d never seen poetry used as these people were, in their various ways, using it,’ Fisher remembered, ‘nor had I seen it ...”

“... and Development’ arm of American fiction – the tradition of Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, William Gaddis and Don DeLillo. That might not sound hard if you think of R&D as a matter of surface effects: pop-cultural references, metafictional gestures, glazed irony and so on. But for Moody (b.1961), as for Jonathan Franzen (b.1959) and David Foster ...”

“... We are a long way from the days when European and American expats – Jane and Paul Bowles, William Burroughs, Joe Orton and others – enjoyed the sexual courtesy of Moroccan lovers while the colonial regime and its successors turned a blind eye.Crucially, in Morocco – though not in Western Sahara – the regime has moved on from its traditional ...”

“... poets and seekers. Heavily dosed on Gertrude Stein, and fired up by a chance encounter with William Carlos Williams, Welch was confirmed in his destiny as an outsider, a casual labourer, cab driver, fisherman, backwoods hermit. He had his task, as writer and recorder, but, unlike Snyder, he never found his place. One day, according to rumour, he walked ...”

“... writing is like, when you hit upon one of his many satirical routines. It is like impacted Burroughs, Ginsberg, Pynchon, all the big US influences of the last twenty years, squashed up into one, and yet made forcefully new and original. The voice is both familiarish-sounding and unrecognisably bizarre. And it is very, very funny in a somewhat ...”

“... large quantities to both sides. British forces could get it over the counter in products such as Burroughs Wellcome’s ‘Forced March’ tablets, until alarms about mass addiction among the troops led to a ban on open sales under the Defence of the Realm Act in 1916. During​ the 1930s a new class of stimulants emerged from the laboratory, cheap to ...”