Rating: 
Summary: A great read...mindblowing
Review: A friend recommended NL to me, without preparing me for the literary experience I was about to embark upon. Burroughs puts to pen his hellish experiences as an addict to junk. The characters and plot fade into a nightmarish landscape of Mugwumps, centipedes, mad doctors, and corrupt cops, who have the nasty habit of disolving the essence of others into themselves.Burroughs plays with words the way Charlie Parker or Coltrane played with notes and rifts of music. There is high poetry found in these pages, with much to enlighten and much to offend (or scare off) the squimish or self-rightous. This book will challenge and expand the limits of the open-minded, it will entertain and horrify, it will repel and make you laugh outloud.
Convinced yet? Naked Lunch should be on the reading menu of everyone.
Rating:
Summary: always notice what's hanging off your fork
Review: I'll never forget the first time I read "Naked Lunch". I was 15 years old and the book made my imagination take off to places I never knew existed, where sex was dangerous, and junk put you in some sort of sci-fi world where nothing was solid or stabile. What made my mind reel most was the brilliant use of the cut-up system which completely transformed my way of writing into something as close to honest as I've ever been. The plot is slippery and hard to grasp at first, but I think thats what appeals to me. If you love jazz and if the rhythm, flow and atmosphere in a book is as important to you as a good plot this is definitely and without a doubt the right book for you - you can thank me later... :)
Rating:
Summary: Stunning!!!
Review: Burroughs takes the reader on a tour de force journey inside the mind and experiences of a junkie. The novel is unlike any other your will ever be likely to read. The scenes of the Black Mass in James Joyce's Ulyssess, inside an Irish whore house, are perhaps the closest literary experience to Burrough's Naked Lunch. Ironically, for a noble and steadfast reader, Burroughs places the "prologue" for NL at the end of the book. I found reading this very helpful to understanding the novel, as much as I could understand it on first read. Burrough's placement is not arbertrary, to say the least. In that moment of "waking clarity" that preceeds sobriety, and eventually, kicking junk for good, ("there are no old junkies", Burroughs reminds us), the glimmers of sanity from obscure madness shine through at this point. Naked Lunch is not for the casual reader. It is a book to be devoured and continplated, and frequently leaves a bad taste in your mouth. Such is addiction to junk, nothing glamerous, only pain, death, madness, and the relentless search for the next fix.
But for those willing to embark on this journey into hell, be advised that the best advice, echoed by several reviewers here, is to just read the words and don't force a meaning into them...you will find no meaning in addiction to junk, only pathos and dispair.
Rating:
Summary: Unbounded Artistry
Review: This book is a rollercoaster ride; filled with thrills and chills but definitely not for the squeamish. If you have a narrow view of what fiction should be and what it should or should not contain, then don't even bother. Your mind will be challenged by the visions that are offered up here; all of it written in a book without chapters. Some of it reads like drama, some are litle vignettes, and other parts more resemble unstructured short stories, and you will find an occassional segment that is more of an essay than fiction. If you find yourself up to the challenge you will find not the spaced-out ravings of a... but a true gem of literature and a genius of an author.
Rating: 
Summary: No Glot Come Friday
Review: (...) The pages of this book were scattered about Burroughs Moroccan den known as Villa Delirium, written during a several month long binge......There is no strict story line just scenes, all of which take place in America. Drugs were Burroughs way of reordering experience according to his need and so thats what the reader gets. The sex is of the extremely unusual kind and is what caused all the controversy about this book upon its publication. The defense of the book by other authors like Ginsberg and Mailer is insightful for the light it sheds on Beat values which will never be mistaken for middle American values, nevertheless the book won its right to exist and remains amazingly popular among retrobeats. The court case is usually summarized in the preface of editions of the book, sort of like a cartoon to prime you for the feature. Weirder writing you will be hard pressed to find. A summary of the book is not a reasonable request but I will say there are some good scenes("they are rebuilding the city again....") which reveal a state of mind, or an orientation to reality that anyone who has experienced a hangover will be able to comprehend. Be American, assert your rights as a reader and read this un-American manifesto destructo. Its a gas.
Rating:
Summary: Surealistic nightmare of delight
Review: Naked lunch was my first exposure to the writings of Mr. Burroughs...if you don't count his collaberation with Tom Waits in "The Black Rider", (on the soundtrack, you can hear Burroughs sing w/ glee that "it ain't no sin to take off your skin, and dance around in your bones") Here we find a book of stream of conscious pornographic images and ever increasing hellish visions of a junkie's mind. Burroughs was an icon of the Beat generation, he is the junkie encountered in New Orleans in "On the Road" by Sal and Dean, he worked with Ginsberg, and more recently, Eddie Vedder and Kurt Cobain. Burroughs strength lies in his disregard for sanity, addiction of anykind is a prison from which no rational thought may escape. Here, in the world of junkie and pusher is the ever present battle for control and freedom in modern life. While quite often frustrating, and almost always offensive, Naked Lunch has moments of profound humor and insight. Few books have made me laugh as hard as some of the scenes in this book. Naked Lunch is so named because according to Burroughs, it describes "a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork". Note Burroughs does not limit this moment of realization to drug addiction, it applies to all aspects of life which seek to enslave us. Naked lunch, as a result, is hard to digest. Readers who look for plot or coherence will be sadly disappointed, and perhaps give up reading this book for something more palpatable. But hang in there, and just enjoy the ride. Naked lunch is a book I am still working through, and will continue to ponder after I have finished it, (26 pages to go!). How many books hook you in like that?
Rating:
Summary: fluoride addicted cockroaches
Review: this is literature for insects. this was burrough's way of fooling intellectual half-wits into the sleazy underground, making offers to both sides. many people like to play the soundtrack to the rather poor cinematic version of "naked lunch" while reading it, but i suggest insect drug music. i actually recommend reading "exterminator" first, and then this in the same session, "exterminator" is ever-so-slightly less morbidly pornographic. dont be surprised if you dream of cockroaches.
Rating:
Summary: It simply boggles the mind
Review: Naked Lunch is perhaps the greatest poem written in the 20th Century, a novel which defies all attempts of casual analysis and forces you to look into the center of the meat of your soul knowing full well you may not like what you see staring back at you. Grind it up to a powder and mix it with the meat of the great aquatic centipede...if you dare.
Rating:
Summary: The nightmare unfolds.
Review: It would be easy to dismiss "Naked Lunch" as a junkie's incoherent nonsense, but, like most surrealism, there is an artistry and intelligence in it that must be acknowledged. Like Herman Hesse's "Steppenwolf," but going much farther beyond the bounds of literary convention, it is about a man's mental journey into the absurd, combining a cautionary tale, political satire, science fiction, and science friction into a world shrouded in a narcotic haze. Burroughs's novel has no plot and no clearly defined characters. It is a story narrated by a junk (opium and opium-derivative drugs, including heroin) addict who is sitting in a barren room somewhere, not having washed for months, needle in hand, searching desperately for a vein anywhere in his body that hasn't been worn out yet from repeated injections. His trips take you to a place he calls Interzone, a multicultural panorama where deranged totalitarian political parties threaten to destroy each other, junkies and perverts writhe in festering filth, and violent orgies of sexual depravity, homoeroticism, pederasty, and scatology fill page after page in lurid detail. It's like a travel guide to Sodom and Gomorrah. I was completely absorbed by the book, even though there was much in it that I honestly didn't understand. I enjoyed the colorful imagery and the frequent sentences of crystalline beauty ("The subway sweeps by with a black blast of iron."), and I just let myself get swept along with the stream-of-consciousness flow of the words. The book is not anti-drugs, but it is anti-addiction and anti-sickness. What Burroughs is emphasizing is control -- if you don't have knowledge about something, it will control you rather than you control it. In the Appendix he writes frankly about the various drugs he's taken, their effects on his health, and their potential for addiction; and while he may not be the most credible scientific authority on the subject, his explanations are clear, concise, and helpful. All this is much more effective and informative than any of Nancy Reagan's flimsy "Just Say No" cream puff propaganda of the 1980's. "Naked Lunch" deserves praise for its honesty rather than criticism for its imagery.
Rating:
Summary: immerse yourself in a total hallucination
Review: "Naked Lunch" was my first exposure to the writing of William S. Burroughs, and the experience was strangely enthralling, to say the least. The disjointed, stream-of-consciousness prose flows in and out of coherence, seldom makes sense, and ultimately wraps itself around your mind like a hallucinogen. Like a dream where you're sleeping yet are aware of everything around you, "Naked Lunch" is the true definition of 'subversive literature.' The explicit emphasis on homosexuality, political turmoil, and drug use as a means of escape from reality are issues Burroughs brings home with an off-kilter sledgehammer intensity. A lot of black humor is keenly woven into the mix (in a way, Bret Easton Ellis--a reluctant successor--did the same with the similarly shocking-but-hilarious "American Psycho"). Needless to say, "Naked Lunch" has piqued my interest in Burroughs. If you read to get lost in another world, another reality, pick this up.
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