Naked Lunch

Critics Review

• “Burroughs possesses a special literary gift…[Naked Lunch] takes a coldly implacable look at the dark side of our nature.”

  New York Times

• “Ever since Naked Lunch…Williams S. Burroughs has been ordained as America’s most incendiary artist.”

  Los Angeles Times

• “William S. Burroughs’ classic tale…is invigorated by this enthusiastic reading. Mark Bramhall offers a professional performance peppered with every trick of the actor’s trade to make it a resonating effort. He approaches the work with such energy that the story seems like a new entity, freshly relevant and timely. Listeners will lose themselves in the journey of junkie William Lee as he makes his way from bizarre destination to even more bizarre destination in this unforgettable novel.”

  Publishers Weekly

• “If Naked Lunch is one of your favorites from the Beat Generation, you MUST, MUST listen to this audio performance! Hallucinatory visions will fill listeners’ minds as narrator Mark Bramhall tells the maddeningly fragmented story of drug addict William Lee, who moves in and out of various states of consciousness as he flees the police, taking to the road and eventually landing in Mexico. Bramhall deftly delivers the nonlinear vignettes that comprise this basically plotless novel, creating a narrative drive that will keep listeners tuned in…The only one who might have done a better job of narrating is Burroughs himself.”

  AudioFile

• “A great, an essential novel…[It] prefigures much that has occurred in history, the popular media, and high and low culture in the last four decades.”

  The Commercial Appeal

• “He was 20th-century drug culture’s Poe, its Artaud, its Baudelaire. He was the prophet of the literature of pure experience, a phenomenologist of dread…Burroughs had the scary genius to turn the junk wasteland into a parallel universe, one as thoroughly and obsessively rendered as Blake’s.”

  Salon

• “Mark Bramhall’s powerful, fully vocalized performance is searing. The characters, with a multitude of accents and a variety of disorders, are individualized memorably and in keeping with the intent of the text. The novel, turns the profane into art. The reading turns the squalid into richness of subject matter. Not for everybody, but an important classic, nevertheless, and a superb narration.”

  SoundCommentary.com

• “William was a shootist. He shot like he wrote—with extreme precision and no fear.”

  Hunter S. Thompson

• “A masterpiece. A cry from hell, a brutal, terrifying, and savagely funny book that swings between uncontrolled hallucination and fierce, exact satire.”

  Newsweek