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Don't Hide the Madness: William S. Burroughs in Conversation with Allen Ginsberg

Two seminal figures of the Beat movement, William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, discuss intimate personal details and the philosophy behind their influential creative lives in a never-before-published four-day conversation edited by longtime Ginsberg collaborator Steven Taylor.

DON’T HIDE THE MADNESS: William S. Burroughs in Conversation with Allen Ginsberg (978-1-941110-70-6, Three Rooms Press, Hardcover, 336 pages, October 16, 2018; $26) has been hailed as a “must-have resource for beat aficianados” by Publishers Weekly and “a beautiful book” by renowned film director Gus Van Sant. The book offers a fly-on-the-wall experience with the driving forces behind two of the 20th century’s literary counterculture masters.

The conversation is interspersed with 17 photographs taken by Ginsberg revealing Burroughs’s daily activities from his painting studio to the shooting range. Renowned artist Robert Crumb created a rare new original image for the cover.

In the course of their dialogue in DON’T HIDE THE MADNESS, Burroughs and Ginsberg discuss:

• the force that drives all creative endeavors

• Native American approaches to creativity and imagination

• shamanic ritual and the creative process

• Burroughs’ cut-up approach to literature

• the magical qualities of cats

• and much more, including drugs, guns, punk rock, and lit-world gossip

The conversation, which occurred in conjunction with the release of David Cronenberg’s film adaption of Burroughs’ groundbreaking “cut-up” novel Naked Lunch, reveals intimate personal history and guiding philosophical dialectic in a magnification allowed by the decades of friendship between these two literary giants. DON’T HIDE THE MADNESS presents an important, hitherto-unpublished primary document of the Beat Generation.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

William S. Burroughs was a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author whose influence is considered to have affected a range of popular culture as well as literature. Burroughs wrote eighteen novels and novellas, including Naked Lunch, Junky, and Queer, as well as six collections of short stories and four collections of essays. In 1991, director David Cronenberg adapted Naked Lunch for the screen.

American poet, philosopher, and photographer Allen Ginsberg is considered to be one of the leading figures of both the Beat Generation during the 1950s and the counterculture that soon followed. He vigorously opposed militarism, economic materialism and sexual repression and embodied various aspects of this counterculture, such as his views on drugs, hostility to bureaucracy, and openness to Eastern religions. Among his many published poetry collections, he is best known for Howl and Other Poems, Kaddish and Other Poems, and Collected Poems, 1947 — 1997.

ABOUT THE EDITOR

Steven Taylor is a poet, musician, songwriter, and ethnomusicologist, and one of Allen Ginsberg’s primary collaborators from 1976 — 1996. Taylor has published two books of poems and a musical ethnography, False Prophet: Field Notes from the Punk Underground. He is a member of the seminal underground rock band The Fugs, and serves on the faculty at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. He lives in Brooklyn.

  • Format
  • hardcover
  • Pages
  • 336
  • Language
  • english
  • ISBN
  • 9781941110706
  • Genres
  • biography
  • Release date
  • 2018