Burroughs’ first book in the Nova Trilogy: a cut-up, fractured, hallucinatory assault on narrative, control systems, addiction, sex, language and power.

Think of it as a transmission picked up through static — bodies, cities, machines, cops, junk, tape loops, erotic paranoia, science fiction and psychic sabotage all spliced into one unstable document. It's very much language as virus, novel as hacked system, plot as something interrupted, scrambled and reassembled. Not always “pleasant” reading, but absolutely central for Beat literature, postwar experimental fiction, cyberpunk ancestry, queer literary history, media theory, and anyone tracing the line from modernism into punk, theory, cut-up, noise and internet fragmentation. For readers of Ballard, Kathy Acker, Pynchon, Deleuze/Guattari-adjacent freaks, and anyone who thinks a book should occasionally feel like it has damaged the furniture.

Fourth Estate paperback edition published 2010. Good second-hand condition overall with visible handling, softened corners, light edgewear and page toning.