Burroughs William S. - Call me Burroughs: a life

To say he was a difficult man to pin down is understatement, but Miles is up to the task Miless comprehensive biography explores all sides of Burroughss dark and complex personality.

Los Angeles Times

[An] overwhelming, enthralling biography Miles relates Burroughss extraordinary life in an equally extraordinary biography, a mesmerizing page-turner depicting not just a season in hell but an entire lifetime. It is also, to use words seldom associated with its subject, balanced, measured, and even-handed a completely magisterial work, exactingly researched and fascinating throughout.

Washington Post

[Miless] access and wealth of detail will make this the go-to biography for many years to come.

New York Times Book Review

The most comprehensive look at the life, work, and cultural impact of the literary outlaw The best look yet at Burroughss life will stand as the definitive bio of one of the twentieth centurys greatest writers and provocateurs.

Lincoln Journal Star

The Burroughs of Miless 600-plus pages is both ghastlier and more impressive than previous models, sliding through the world like a cross between Sam Spade and Flat Stanley.

Atlantic

Miles brings a judicious reserve to recording one of the most chaotic lives in the recent history of the arts Miles laudably consigns himself to the job of mere reportage, favoring simple language and a fast-moving narrative largely devoid of the biographers armchair analysis. This stylistic modesty is ultimately CALL ME BURROUGHSs greatest strengtha kind of economic bulwark against the flood of ideas that characterize its subjects tireless lust for expression.

Time Out New York

A vivid biography of the beat wild man Thanks to Miles, the undead old devil here enjoys the last laugh.

Guardian (U.K.)

Exhaustive and enlightening.

Las Vegas Weekly

Miles writes [with] clarity, a great ear for language and a great eye for detail quite possibly the best biography written about the man to date.

PopMatters.com

Torrentially detailed, explicit, and dramatic [a] forthrightly definitive biography.

Booklist (starred review)

[A] huge, engaging, vignette-crammed biography With the help of Miless extensive research, he makes for a captivating antihero.

Boston Globe

Burroughs emerges as his own greatest character in this raucous biography a dense, detailed, yet wonderfully readable and entertaining narrative Miles just puts it all on paper with aplomb and deadpan wit, showing how the gross-out surrealism of Burroughss fiction flowed from the lurid creativity of everyday life.

Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Engrossing, deeply researched a massive biography that is filled with information and doesnt flinch from controversy.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

One long, strange, profoundly American literary life. Burroughss work has had a profound if often oblique influence on the writing of his century and this one. I can scarcely imagine what it would be like to read Barry Miless biography without being thoroughly familiar with the outline of the narrative. Truly, stranger than fiction.

William Gibson

Meticulous thorough This work all but resurrects Burroughs in print.

Library Journal

CALL ME BURROUGHS takes us deeply inside the magical life of the great writer. Miless decision to tell the epic story through William Burroughss search for his Ugly Spirit makes for sensational reading. Brilliant, tragic, controversial, and inspiring, CALL ME BURROUGHS is a beautiful work.

Victor Bockris, author of With William Burroughs: A Report from the Bunker, Conversations with William Burroughs and Andy Warhol, and Burroughs in the Bunker

CALL ME BURROUGHS is the most intimate portrait to date of one of the twentieth centurys most complicated, troubled, and influential figures. Miless deep knowledge of the man and the work also provides a cultural history of the scene in Tangiers in the 1950s, the Beat era, and the emerging Punk scene in New York in the 1980s. It is a compelling biography and social history unlike any other.

Ira Silverberg, co-editor of Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader

CALL ME BURROUGHS is full of energy and surprise and is a delight to read. Barry Miles combines his intimate knowledge of Burroughs with the meticulous research of Burroughss companion James Grauerholz, to produce an extremely accurate, readable, and entertaining biography of one of the most inventive writers of the twentieth century. Reading this extraordinary book is like hanging around with Burroughs himself and is impossible to forget.

Bill Morgan, author of I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg and The Typewriter Is Holy

By any standard Burroughss was an unusual life, full of scandal, subversion, and sensitivity hidden behind a cold blue gaze. Miles enriches this life of an artist with decades of dedicated immersion in the work both published and unpublished, digging deep into archival material and manuscripts, incorporating journals of friends and acquaintances. With great authority and verve, he brings up to date the legacy of a true American original who grows, even years after his death, in fascination.