Call Me Burroughs

Starred review from December 9, 2013
The pioneering American countercultural writer and artist William Burroughs emerges as his own greatest character in this raucous biography. Biographer and Burroughs editor Miles (Jack Kerouac: King of the Beats) pens a dense, detailed, yet wonderfully readable and entertaining narrative that illuminates, without sensationalizing, Burroughs’s manifold peculiarities: his avid sexual interest in teenaged boys; his use of hashish, hallucinogens, and heroin; his petty crimes and drug-dealing; his love of casual gunplay (he fatally shot his wife during a game of William Tell); his obsession with other-worldly phenomena, from Scientology, to UFO abductions, to his own theories of giant intergalactic insects that control everything; his hair-trigger psychodramas with intimates and complete strangers; his embrace of every experience, especially those that appalled and disgusted him; the fastidious manners and banker’s wardrobe that made his anti-social provocations seem even more subversive. Miles’s exhaustively researched account draws on the writer’s blunt, self-revealing private writings along with reminiscences from Allen Ginsburg, Jack Kerouac, and other associates to flesh out Burroughs’s personality, surroundings, and equally colorful circle of acquaintances, who were forever doing interesting things like getting mauled by lions. Miles just puts it all on paper with aplomb and deadpan wit, showing how the gross-out surrealism of Burroughs’s fiction flowed from the lurid creativity of everyday life.Agent: James Macdonald Lockhart, the Antony Harwood Agency (U.K.).

December 1, 2013
A ponderous revisiting of the strange and terrible life of the godfather of America's Beat movement. In this strange season for literary biographies, we've already worked through J. Michael Lennon's warm but thorough portrait of a combative Norman Mailer and the controversial and revelatory Salinger, by David Shields and filmmaker Shane Salerno. William Burroughs (1914-1997) is an equally bizarre figure whose hallucinatory and experimental works of art and unpredictable journey rained influence down the generations from Jack Kerouac to Kurt Cobain. This wedge of biographical examination is no less doorstop-worthy but hardly the definitive biography of the mad genius of Lawrence, Kan. First of all, Miles (In the Seventies: Adventures in the Counterculture, 2011, etc.) carries some fairly weighty credibility, having known Burroughs and his contemporaries from 1965 on. However, the author has already exhaustively covered the Beat movement in numerous biographies, not least in William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible (1993). Here, it's seldom that we hear that laconic drawl and snarling wit that Burroughs carried into old age, which is clearly missed. Instead, Miles goes down the well-worn path of meticulously tracking his subject through time and place instead of through attitude and output. Even the pivot point of the novelist's life--the 1951 misadventure in Mexico during which Burroughs shot and killed his wife--elicits little in the way of emotional insight into that furious whirlwind. Answers from a man the author knew and interviewed many times could have changed the way Burroughs is painted; pointing instead to a confessional sliver of text from the Tom Waits collaboration The Black Rider is avoidance. While segments about the writing of groundbreaking works like Naked Lunch and heroin-fueled binges in Tangiers and Paris are satisfyingly voyeuristic, the biography is ultimately neither sensational enough to court controversy nor keen enough to be useful to future scholars.

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Starred review from January 1, 2014
Born to wealth and respectability in St. Louis, William Seward Burroughs (191497) relied on his parents' support until his fifties, while submerged in an underworld of drugs and crime. His risky misadventures in New York, Chicago, Mexico City, Texas, New Orleans, London, Paris, and Tangiers stoked his incendiary, innovative, and influential books, including Naked Lunch (1959) and Cities of the Red Night (1981). On the centennial of Burroughs' birth, accomplished biographer Miles turns in a torrentially detailed, explicit, and dramatic chronicle of Burroughs' wild life as outlaw, social critic, writer, performer, and artist. Guru to the Beats, the counterculture, punk rockers, and cyberpunk writers, Burroughs was a walking paradox, a radical who dressed like a bureaucrat, a fierce advocate of freedom chained to his addictions. Though homosexual, he married a German Jew while in Europe during Hitler's ascent, saving her life, then later accidentally killed his second wife. Miles illuminates every facet of Burroughs' life, from his passions for guns and the occult to his depthless hunger for drugs and boys, visual and audio art, and crucial friendships with Allen Ginsberg and artist Brion Gysin. Nomadic Burroughs finally settled down in Lawrence, Kansas, thanks to James Grauerholz, who managed Burroughs' famed reading tours and exhibits and gathered much of the arresting material Miles uses so powerfully in this forthrightly definitive biography.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

August 1, 2013

Beat expert Miles--e.g., Ginsberg: A Biography and coeditor, the revised edition of William Burroughs's Naked Lunch--arrives with a big Burroughs bio just in time for the centennial of the author's birth. Relying on interviews with folks like Allen Ginsberg, Lucien Carr, and Burroughs himself, plus exclusive access to Burroughs's archives, Miles aims to capture the protean genius who wrote, drew, photographed, acted, and made recordings on his way to becoming one of the hottest figures on the Sixties counterculture scene.

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 1, 2013

In addition to writing extensive histories and biographies on the Beat movement, London underground culture, and 1960s music titans, Miles (Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now) was also friend and editor to William S. Burroughs (1914-97). This book's title comes from Burroughs's debut recording of the same name, which Miles had a hand in releasing. Drawing from thousands of conversations, interviews, writings, recordings, and other sources, this work all but resurrects Burroughs in print as it documents the roots and development of his mysterious creative techniques. His personality is a unique mix of "newscaster," monk, and junkie, and Miles explores the influence of cultures such as Tangiers and Mexico on the man, both personally and artistically. A meticulous description of each of his love and sex interests (the vast majority men and boys) is provided as is a thorough portrait of his place among various literary luminaries (e.g., Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac). This is a complete biography, and as such it is important to understand that since Burroughs had some repetition in his life, many parts of the book are repetitious as well. For this reason, a shorter biography of only part of his life, such as Jorge Garcia-Robles's The Stray Bullet (reviewed above), may be more suitable. VERDICT Highly recommended for readers of Burroughs, Beat historians, and fans of Beat lit, biography, LGBT lit, and experimental artists.--Benjamin Brudner, Curry Coll. Lib., Milton, MA

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.