Cities of the Red Night

by William S. Burroughs Narrated by Ray Porter

Overview

From one of the founders of the beat generation and the 1960s counterculture comes this opening novel of a series available now in audio for the first time.

An opium addict is lost in the jungle; young men wage war against an empire of mutants; a handsome young pirate faces his execution; and the world's population is infected with a radioactive epidemic. These stories are woven together in a single tale of mayhem and chaos. In the first novel of the trilogy continued in The Place of Dead Roads and The Western Lands, William Burroughs sharply satirizes modern society in a poetic and shocking story of sex, drugs, disease, and adventure.

Editorial Reviews

Kirkus Reviews

As long as the Beat Generation continues to engage self-styled hipsters, counter-culturalists, and transgressors, the work of the late Burroughs (1914—97) will continue to waste precious wood pulp. Admired for what we now know to be something of a group effort—Naked Lunch—Burroughs never repeated its critical success, though extraliterary scandal (and constant marketing by Allen Ginsberg) helped keep him in the public eye. First published in 1981, Cities of the Red Night was no exception: Kirkus pronounced it DOA. Meandering and full of "neo-Reichian crackpottery," we dismissed it as "ponderous, self-anesthetized," and dealing in "pursy anarcho-pietisms and tennis-shoe philosophy." Worst of all, it's "not at all funny"—"a sad come-down" for a writer who once seemed to have an almost vaudevillian sense of shtick and surprise. What's left, then and now? Kirkus's view still holds: "a dry schist of pornographic semi-moralism so flavorlessly numbing that we can't really imagine it offending" anyone, puritans or plain-old readers.

From the Publisher

Cities of the Red Night is Burroughs's masterpiece. In it, the world ends with a bang—and a barely perceived whimper, disguised by the wicked smile of one of the most dazzling magicians of our time.” —Los Angeles Time Book Review

“Cities of the Red Night is not only Burroughs' best work, but a logical and ripening extension of all of Burroughs's great work.” —Ken Kesey

“One should approach Cities of the Red Night as the Wagneresque capper of all the five or six homosexual planet-operas Burroughs has scripted since he found a genuine new style in Naked Lunch . . . It's as if we had gotten hold of a black ticket to his unconscious, and anyone who makes the trip will see sights and feel feelings that are unique and mind-bending beyond anyone else's description” —The Washington Post Book World

“Cities of the Red Night is the most complete and most devastatingly sardonic statement of William Burroughs's apocalyptic vision. Through his mordant satire of cultural aspirations, homosexual eroticism and political power, he focuses our gaze into the abyss. His cold, surgical language creates beauty through a terror that we are just able to bear . . . A modern Inferno.” —Newsday

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169914146
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	03/15/2016
Series:	Red Night Trilogy , #1
Edition description:	Unabridged

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