A remarkably trenchant collection of early stories by “the dark prince of American letters” exploring the injustice and desperation of a forgotten America (Pete Hamill, author of A Drinking Life). Bold and uncompromising, Gentleman Junkie and Other Stories of the Hung-up Generation is a watershed moment in Harlan Ellison’s early writing career. Rather than dealing in speculative fiction, these twenty-five short stories directly tackle issues of discrimination, injustice, bigotry, and oppression by the police. Pulling from his own experience, Ellison paints vivid portraits of the helpless and downtrodden, blazing forth with the kind of unblinking honesty that would define his career. Reviewing this collection, Dorothy Parker called Ellison “a good, honest, clean writer, putting down what he has seen and known, and no sensationalism about it.”
A portrait of the iconoclastic literary pioneer describes his early life and education, his growing addiction to heroin, his role in the Beat movement, his landmark works, and his influence on the late twentieth century arts.
Today many in Hollywood and the media have declared open warfare on the family, education, and Christianity in general. Intellectuals have labeled religion, particularly Christianity, as mere wish fulfillment or a virus of the mind, something to be eradicated at all costs. In Christianity's Dangerous Idea, Jonas Alexis picks up where he left off in his previous books and continues to examine the ideological fallacies that have been fabricated in order to attack Christianity and the people who promote those fallacies. This latest book is a tour de force of rigorous logic and testable evidence for the Christian worldview from history, science, experience, common sense, and final destiny. More importantly, Alexis subjects the rivals of Christianity to the same rigorous testing. Christianity's Dangerous Idea clearly demonstrates the destructive nature of popular atheistic and anti-Christian philosophies, spread throughout Western culture by such famous people as Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, David Cronenberg, Steven Spielberg, Alan Moore, William S. Burroughs, Philip K. Dick, Bruce Lee, Ayn Rand, Bart D. Ehrman, Richard Dawkins, and many more. In a scholarly yet readable fashion, Alexis shows that what the ancient Greeks often referred to as "the cult of Dionysus" has become mainstream in our modern age.
A new novel by Hollywood’s "master of satire." The myth of an epic, public life—its triumphs and tragedies—is a particularly American obsession. ROAR is a metafictional exploration of such a life and attendant fame of an extraordinary, and completely made up, man. Born in Nashville in 1940 and adopted by a wealthy San Francisco couple, Roger Orr—“Roar”—became an underground stand-up comedian with a cult following while still in his teens, segueing to an acclaimed songwriter in the Sixties. In the decades that followed, his talent spanned the worlds of entertainment, from film directing and books to fine art (paintings, sculpture). His promethean energies expanded to the world of medicine; he became a dermatologist, the first to patent cadaver skin for burn victims. A spiritual seeker who returned to India throughout his life, Roar was also a voracious lover of both men and women. The journey of Roger Orr was a premonition of the cultural earthquakes to come. It wasn’t until his 40s that Roar learned his birth mother was black and it wasn't until his early 60s when he began the hormonal treatment and surgeries that chipped away at the armor covering what he always knew was his true identity: that of a woman. Roar’s saga is best told by a cacophony of voices—family members, critics, historians, and the famous (Meryl Streep, Amanda Gorman, Dave Chappelle, Andy Warhol)—including some heard from the grave. In ROAR, Wagner brilliantly paints a vivid picture of one man, our times, and our culture's enduring obsession with fame.
Booklist Top of the List Reference Source The heir and successor to Eric Partridge's brilliant magnum opus, The Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, this two-volume New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English is the definitive record of post WWII slang. Containing over 60,000 entries, this new edition of the authoritative work on slang details the slang and unconventional English of the English-speaking world since 1945, and through the first decade of the new millennium, with the same thorough, intense, and lively scholarship that characterized Partridge's own work. Unique, exciting and, at times, hilariously shocking, key features include: unprecedented coverage of World English, with equal prominence given to American and British English slang, and entries included from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, India, South Africa, Ireland, and the Caribbean emphasis on post-World War II slang and unconventional English published sources given for each entry, often including an early or significant example of the term’s use in print. hundreds of thousands of citations from popular literature, newspapers, magazines, movies, and songs illustrating usage of the headwords dating information for each headword in the tradition of Partridge, commentary on the term’s origins and meaning New to this edition: A new preface noting slang trends of the last five years Over 1,000 new entries from the US, UK and Australia New terms from the language of social networking Many entries now revised to include new dating, new citations from written sources and new glosses The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English is a spectacular resource infused with humour and learning – it’s rude, it’s delightful, and it’s a prize for anyone with a love of language.
The leading journal devoted to all aspects of popular culture and cult media, Headpress 25 turns its attention to the Dream, or Flicker, Machine. Featuring interviews with William Burroughs and Paul Bowles, Headpress 25 also includes a detailed look at the neglected life and career of the late Luis de Jesus, a star of diminutive stature whose film appearances range from sadistic sidekick in the cult 1976 feature Blood Sucking Freaks, to numerous hardcore porn features, of which the most notorious is The Anal Dwarf.
Through critical readings Gerald Alva Miller, Jr., examines the life of William S. Burroughs and the evolution of his various radical styles not just in writing but also in audio, film, and painting. Although Burroughs remains tied to the Beat Generation, his works prove more revolutionary. Miller argues that Burroughs, more than any other author, ushered in the era of both postmodern fiction and poststructural philosophy. Through this study Miller situates Burroughs within the larger countercultural movements that began in the 1950s, when his novels became influential because of their examination of various control systems (from sex and drugs to global or even intergalactic conspiracies). Understanding William S. Burroughs begins by considering his early, straightforward narratives. Despite being more stylistically conventional, they broke new ground with their depictions of junkies, gay people, and others marginalized by society. The publication of Naked Lunch shattered all literary paradigms in terms of form and content. Naked Lunch and the cut-up novels, recordings, films, and art that followed constitute one of the twentieth century's most sustained and methodical aesthetic experiments, placing Burroughs alongside Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov, and Thomas Pynchon in terms of both innovation and influence. Burroughs eventually turned his attention toward imagining methods of using the control "machinery" against itself. Often considered his masterpiece, the Red Night Trilogy of the 1980s ranges across time and space, and life and death, in its quest to discover the ultimate form of freedom. His antiestablishment stance and virulent attacks on various types of oppression have caused Burroughs to remain a highly influential figure to each new generation of authors, artists, musicians, and philosophers. The hippies, punks, and cyberpunks were all heavily indebted to the man whom many people called el hombre invisible, and his works prove more relevant than ever in the twenty-first century.
