Exterminator!

by William S. Burroughs

Overview

A wity, rauchy, satrical novel from the Beat legend and author of Naked Lunch

Conspirators plot to explode a train carrying nerve gas. A perfect servant suddenly reveals himself to be the insidious Dr. Fu Manchu. Science-fantasy wars, racism, corporate capitalism, drug addiction, and various medical and psychiatric horrors all play their parts in this mosaiclike, experimental novel. Here is William S. Burroughs at his coruscating and hilarious best.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780140050035
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/29/1979
Pages:	176
Sales rank:	515,163
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.60(h) x 0.40(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

William S. Burroughs (1914-1997) was an American novelist, short story writer, satirist, essayist, painter, and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author who wrote in the paranoid fiction genre, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th century". His influence is considered to have affected a range of popular culture as well as literature. Burroughs wrote eighteen novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays including Naked Lunch, Queer, Exterminator!, The Cat Inside, The Western Lands, My Education, and Interzone.

Date of Birth:

February 4, 1914

Date of Death:

August 2, 1997

Place of Birth:

St. Louis, Missouri

Place of Death:

Lawrence, Kansas

Education:

Los Alamos Ranch School; A.B., Harvard University, 1936; graduate study, 1938

Table of Contents

	"Exterminator!"	3
	The Lemon Kid	9
	Short Trip Home	15
	Davy Jones	17
	The Evening News	20
	Astronaut's Return	22
	My Face	28
	Wind Die. You Die. We Die	36
	End of the Line	46
	The Drums of Death	50
	"Johnny 23"	52
	The Discipline of DE	55
	The Perfect Servant	68
	Ali's Smile	74
	Twilight's Last Gleamings	85
	The Coming of the Purple Better One	93
	"What Washington? What Orders?"	110
	From Here to Eternity	115
	The Teacher	119
	They Do Not Always Remember	133
	Friends	137
	Seeing Red	141
	Old Movie	143
	Electricals	144
	SPUT	149
	Reddies	152
	The "Priest" They Called Him	156
	My Legs Senor	160
	The End	162
	Cold Lost Marbles	168

Editorial Reviews

PRAISE FOR EXTERMINATOR!

"Among his most important books." — The New York Times (1997) 

"Since this is Burroughs...there are still a few things we can depend on: narratives spin in surrealist swirls; bodies are hideously transformed and giddily abused; sci-fi gadgetry abounds. The forbidden philias get short shrift; but sodomy, sadism, murder and excrement (lots of it!) find their way, often together, into his gleefully suppurating prose." — The New York Times (1973)

"Another compendium of sci-fi, horror-erotica, and general culture-snuffing by America's richest ex-junkie.... He may be our only writer whose socio-political apocalyptica transcend both paranoia and triviality; his imagination is superb, his ear savagely satiric..." — Kirkus Reviews


PRAISE FOR WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS: 

"The only American novelist who may conceivably be possessed by genius.” —Norman Mailer

“Burroughs is the greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift. . . . Swift and Rabelais and Sterne accomplished a step in that direction, and Burroughs another.” —Jack Kerouac

"He’s a writer of enormous richness whose books are a kind of attempt to blow up this cozy conspiracy, to allow us to see what’s on the end of the fork . . . the truth.” —J. G. Ballard

“Burroughs was the last great avatar of literary modernism..." — Will Self

“A creator of grim fairy tales for adults, Burroughs spoke to our nightmare fears and, still worse, to our nightmare longings. . . . And more than any other postwar wordsmith, he bridged generations; popularity in the youth culture is greater now than during the heady days of the Beats.” —The Los Angeles Times Book Review

From the Publisher