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Product Description
William Burroughs closed his classic debut novel, Junky, by saying he had determined to search out a drug he called 'Yage' which he believed transmitted telepathic powers, a drug that could be 'the final fix'. In The Yage Letters - a mix of travel writing, satire, psychedelia and epistolary novel - he journeys through South America, writing to his friend Allen Ginsberg about his experiments with the strange drug, using it to travel through time and space, to derange his senses - the perfect drug for the author of the wild decentred books that followed. Years later, Ginsberg writes back as he follows in Burroughs' footsteps, and the drug worse and more profound than he had imagined.
About the Author
William S. Burroughs was born on February 5, 1914 in St Louis. In work and in life Burroughs expressed a lifelong subversion of the morality, politics and economics of modern America. To escape those conditions, and in particular his treatment as a homosexual and a drug-user, Burroughs left his homeland in 1950, and soon after began writing. By the time of his death he was widely recognised as one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the twentieth century. His numerous books include Naked Lunch, Junky, Queer, Nova Express, Interzone, The Wild Boys, The Ticket That Exploded and The Soft Machine. After living in Mexico City, Tangier, Paris, and London, Burroughs finally returned to America in 1974. He died in 1997.
Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) was an American poet, best known for the poem Howl (1956), celebrating his friends of the Beat Generation and attacking what he saw as the destructive forces of materialism and conformity in the United States at the time. He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, was awarded the medal of Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture, won the National Book Award for The Fall of America, and was a co-founder of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute, the first accredited Buddhist college in the Western world.
Oliver Harris is an Oxford graduate, and wrote his doctoral dissertation on William S. Burroughs. He is currently a lecturer in American Literature at the University of Keele.
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4 reviews
6 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Non-fiction.
1 Mar 2007
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Of all of Bill Burroughs' works, I enjoy his fictions that were closest to his life as he lived it. QUEER and JUNKY are my favorites, as they deal so honestly with the very strange world in which he moved. I realize that his cut-outs and dream-like novels are important and quite moving to many, but they just never impressed me the way his earlier books do.
THE YAGE LETTERS recounts Burroughs' trip to South America to search out the legendary drug "Yage" which he hoped would enable him to grasp something like mental telepathy. Yes, it's a mad notion and this journey is certainly equally mad, as he moves freely among primitive folk and capitalist exploiters and thieves and holy men and jungle bureaucrats and fellow travellers and drug addicts. Ultimately, the feeling that I was left with was that Yage, like so many other drugs, was nothing but poison. WB lovingly details the search for the material, the preparation of the matter, and the nausea-inducing reactions to the drug that proved only to be a mild hallucinatory.
But it isn't the Yage itself that drives this book. Rather, it's the journey. I highly recommend joining Burroughs in this prose trek.
THE YAGE LETTERS recounts Burroughs' trip to South America to search out the legendary drug "Yage" which he hoped would enable him to grasp something like mental telepathy. Yes, it's a mad notion and this journey is certainly equally mad, as he moves freely among primitive folk and capitalist exploiters and thieves and holy men and jungle bureaucrats and fellow travellers and drug addicts. Ultimately, the feeling that I was left with was that Yage, like so many other drugs, was nothing but poison. WB lovingly details the search for the material, the preparation of the matter, and the nausea-inducing reactions to the drug that proved only to be a mild hallucinatory.
But it isn't the Yage itself that drives this book. Rather, it's the journey. I highly recommend joining Burroughs in this prose trek.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Required reading for budding Ayahuasqueros
12 July 2008
Format:Paperback
The book that awoke Western interest in the Amazonian shamanic potion, Ayahuasca (A.K.A. Yage in Columbia).
Through his letters to Beat poet Allen Ginsburg we follow William Burroughs as he travels down from Panama towards Colombia in search of the mythical potion Yage in 1953. Burroughs writes with bile dripping in every sentence as he passes damning judgment on everybody and everything from the locals to the expats, ("I never knew a Dane that wasn't bone dull". or "The Chinese are all basically Junkies in outlook"), gets thrown in jail and languishes under town arrest in some flea bitten village while fighting Malaria - all the while trying to locate a shaman to try out Yage with.
When he does manage to finally locate a willing shaman, Burroughs' Yage accounts are curiously muted experiences - nausea, purging, some numbness convulsions and minor hallucinations. However, no real epiphanic moments or fundamental inner transformation is revealed. Ginsburg's later 1960 experiences, on the other hand, provide much more detail as to the composition, preparation and ritualistic use of Ayahuasca, and his experiences prove much more powerful and mythopoetic than Burroughs' - "I felt like a snake vomiting out the universe" His experiences are profound as he connects with the "Great being within"and describes his experience as 'The ringing sound in all the sense of everything that has ever been created". Three years later in 1963 Ginsburg sums up his Ayahuasca experiences thus: "transfiguration of self consciousness from homeless mind sensation of eternal fright to incarnate body feeling present bliss now actualised."
Despite rambling in places, it's a quick and worthwhile read, mainly of historical interest to see how two mid-twentieth century literary figures responded to Ayahuasca, inadvertently helping propel the potion to international prominence. .
Through his letters to Beat poet Allen Ginsburg we follow William Burroughs as he travels down from Panama towards Colombia in search of the mythical potion Yage in 1953. Burroughs writes with bile dripping in every sentence as he passes damning judgment on everybody and everything from the locals to the expats, ("I never knew a Dane that wasn't bone dull". or "The Chinese are all basically Junkies in outlook"), gets thrown in jail and languishes under town arrest in some flea bitten village while fighting Malaria - all the while trying to locate a shaman to try out Yage with.
When he does manage to finally locate a willing shaman, Burroughs' Yage accounts are curiously muted experiences - nausea, purging, some numbness convulsions and minor hallucinations. However, no real epiphanic moments or fundamental inner transformation is revealed. Ginsburg's later 1960 experiences, on the other hand, provide much more detail as to the composition, preparation and ritualistic use of Ayahuasca, and his experiences prove much more powerful and mythopoetic than Burroughs' - "I felt like a snake vomiting out the universe" His experiences are profound as he connects with the "Great being within"and describes his experience as 'The ringing sound in all the sense of everything that has ever been created". Three years later in 1963 Ginsburg sums up his Ayahuasca experiences thus: "transfiguration of self consciousness from homeless mind sensation of eternal fright to incarnate body feeling present bliss now actualised."
Despite rambling in places, it's a quick and worthwhile read, mainly of historical interest to see how two mid-twentieth century literary figures responded to Ayahuasca, inadvertently helping propel the potion to international prominence. .
0 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Junky é ainda o grande livro
19 May 2008
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Legal, mas nem tanto. Se vc é a sua primeira leitura de Burroughs deixe esse pra depois e compre o Junky.
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