Rating: 
Summary: junkies, partners and work
Review: The consistency of the story is kind of non-edible but the story keeps you on your heels. The Vigalante and all the others in the gang are true characters of the herion chain start. Burroughs really did blow the roof of the the national publishing system with this book. Never has something like this been published. It is a must if you are a ture reader.
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Summary: An Abysmal Howl
Review: Burroughs scores some points for having the gumption to put something out there as unrefined and experimental as Naked Lunch-the book is the abysmal howl of the agonized junkie in the street. Unfortunately, howl that it is, it often falters and falls into the inarticulate. The reason being, what the cut-up method gains in striking imagery and jarring juxtaposition it sacrifices in meaning-it often tends toward nonsense. To see work that is stylistically as innovative, as evocative, that is far more haunting and adds up when the last page is turned, check out two underrated underground classics: Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch and Vincent Czyz's Adrift in a Vanishing City. Okay, Czyz's book is only two years old, it's not a classic yet, but like Hopscotch, it goes far beyond the simple stylistic power of Naked Lunch and both books mirror their lyrical prowess with structural genius (Hopscotch moreso than Adrift). These two are probably everything Burroughs wanted to accomplish, but didn't have the right drugs to pull off. As for eroticism, Czyz and Cortazar have scenes unparalleled in the raw poetry of sex (wait till you get to the scene in ancient Sodom in Adrift). Take it from a man who's spent his life underground eating from a can, these two guys blow the doors off Burroughs.
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Summary: Better than an acid trip (not that I'd know)
Review: Definitely one of the quirkier highlights of that sometimes strange animal we call "literature", this is a book you have to shove right up to someone and make them read it right in front of you, attempting to describe it by way of recommendation will only get strange looks and perhaps people's revaulation of their opinion of you. But how do you describe it? I took a stab at it and said it was about a drug addict and in a sense that's right and in a sense that's so far from the truth as to be absurd. But absurd is what the book is all about, Burroughs seems to be lampooning and satirizing everything he can about American culture, from the highest skyscrapers to the utter dregs in the gutter, he hits all the highs and lows of this country, and you can spend multiple readings trying to piece together what it all means. The narrative is completely non-linear and really only the beginning and end make much sense, whether that was delibrate or not or whether it was just the way it all fell together is beyond me. The middle you just sort of have to experience and get whatever out of it you can, needless to say don't skip it, once you wade past the bizarre imagery, absurdist characters and situations and the nonstop onslaught of sexual activities (most of the them drug related), you'll find some of the best writing this century. There's science-fiction, hallucatinations, crime, just about everything you can think of. And while you might think that Burroughs is just messing with the reader and throwing up all that wild and perverse stuff as a front to pretend he's a good writer, get to the literally breathtaking end and you'll see that this man had talent that we rarely see. Extremely ahead of its time (it was written and published in the late fifties . . . there was nothing remotely like this back then), much like William Gaddis' The Recognitions a few years before (though for completely different reasons), even today and in the years between, very little has come along that even begins to match it for sheer style and audicity. Not for the faint of heart, but something everyone should attempt anyway.
Rating: 
Summary: Naked Lunch
Review: A work of art that I could not put down from the very start. Burroughs takes you to a confused fantasy world that is terribly brutal, but express his views of politics, drug use, capital punishiment, and society, in a funny, comedic light. This is definitely not a book for the closed minded or those with weak stomachs. Open your mind, open this book and prepared to be terrified and laugh your ass off at the same time.
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Summary: burroughs/kerouac fan from california
Review: Wow, this is an unbelievable book which has no equal, disguised as a self analysis of herion addiction, nobody would doubt the social or political significance of this book. This is not a book but a extended mad ranting, ideas poured straight from the brain of the man who had more ideas than anybody of his time, truly a timeless book
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Summary: Do the research
Review: Do the follow-up research online and find out the genius behind the text. Stay with it, it is indeed a masterpiece not only for the Beat generation but for 20th century American fiction. Cunning use of language.
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Summary: I can feel the Heat closing in...
Review: This is Burrough's second novel and probably his best. It's a nightmarish dive into a drug addicits' mind in which turns into a variety of "routines" that will linger with the reader for a very long time. This is the best book to read out of the beat generation and will give would-be novelist a different idea of what a "novel" can do and should be.
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Summary: Funny and intelligent.
Review: As other reviewers have complained, this book is lacking a plot and doesn't have much of a structure. A reader looking for a a more clear and simplistic Burroughs should try out his pulpish but entertaining _Junkie_ and _Queer_. These books use an autobiographical format to show the author falling into a life of drugs and homosexual dependence, which the author clearly viewed as entrapping and morally wrong, even as he fell into them and maintained a objective viewpoint. Naked Lunch takes these themes and greatly improves them. After starting with a scene of the protaganist fleeing the law, it's broken into vaguely related scenes of several pages each. These scenes are often bizarre or disgusting, but are always intriguing. Taken together, they give an impressionistic look into the life of an addict. They are often extremely funny, and the writing is very impressive. I enjoy pulp fiction, and Burrough's take at pulp fiction at the end, with Hauser & O'Brien, is perhaps the strongest piece of hard-boiled detective writing I've ever read. Drugs are central to Burrough's vision, but this isn't really a drug book, either, and is more about Burrough's compelling if slightly twisted philosophies. Heroin is used as a central metaphor for systems of control that Burroughs sees elsewhere - in domineering characters, in 50's politics, in modern science, in patriarchies. If the reader can get past the initial shock of the book, it's extremely readable and I'd recommend it highly
Rating: 
Summary: Man what was that all about?
Review: I freely will admit to most people that I am an almost rabid consumer of literature. (as the hero in this book was a rabid consumer of drugs) Rarely do I come across a book I can put down, let alone quit reading in the middle of. But this book sent me packing! It really coins the word "trash". Also, until now I believed a book could never be to sexually explicet, but this novel changed my mind. It's downright shameless in some parts. I love the avante garde poetry of the author's buddy, beatnick Alan Ginsburg, so I wonder how this guy messed up? Oh it must've been the drugs. If you're looking for a good drug saturated book, try "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas". It does what "Naked Lunch" was trying to do, only unlike this book, it can be coherent at times.
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Summary: Naked Lunch is like a Jackson Pollack painting
Review: Has anyone ever seen a Jackson Pollack painting? They're the ones that look like the artist just dumped a bunch of paint onto the canvas and decided to call it art. He probably took no more than 5 minutes to make one. Well, the same can be said for Naked Lunch by Burroughs. To me, it seemed he just wrote whatever came into his drug-addicted head, had Ginsberg or one of his cronies compile his scribbling into a novel-form, and decided to call it a book. What a joke. I was always told in my writing workshop classes to show--not tell. But all Burroughs does in Naked Lunch is tell. No wonder it's only 200 pages long! If he actually showed some things--it would've been twice as long and probably a lot more interesting. Naked Lunch is a perfect example of "lazy" writing. The Lost Generation writers (e.g. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Joyce) started a movement like the Beats--but at least they weren't lazy. Hemingway would spend hours on just one sentence--he was that meticulous! And look at the results--Hemingway won a Pulitzer Prize (for Old Man and the Sea) and the Nobel Prize for Literature; Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby is considered to be one of the greatest American novels of the 20th century; and Joyce's Ulysses is considered by many scholars to be the BEST novel of the 20th century. It's no surprise that the Beat writers never attained the same stature as the Lost Generation writers--they were lazy and not any good.
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