Conversations with William S. Burroughs /

With the 1997 deaths of Burroughs and Ginsberg, the beats are almost all gone. But, bearing in mind the posthumous prolificacy of Jack Kerouac, keep some shelves open for the other beats' leavings and variorums, beginning with these books. Before his death, Burroughs kept a more or less daily log of his obsessions more than his daily doings. Last Words repetitively rambles on about the war on drugs (Burroughs loathed it), the Big Lie (by the powerful to keep themselves in power), and death, especially the passings of Timothy Leary, Ginsberg, and the cats that became the great objects of Burroughs' affection during his last years. Those who can conjure Burroughs' dry Missouri-twanging speaking voice and who value the black slapstick comedy of the alternative world he continued to reveal in these jottings will most enjoy them. Readers less acquainted with Burroughs should first sample Allen Hibbard's collection of interviews with Burroughs, most of them gathered from journals both famous and obscure. Burroughs was always a cooperative subject, always himself--iconoclastic, anarchic, gentlemanly, erudite, and cranky all at once--and always laugh-aloud funny. Especially delightful and outreis a joint interview of Burroughs and macabre-film director David Cronenberg. Ginsberg had a retrospective of his prose under way but not complete when he died. Editor Morgan says Ginsberg would have added more reprinted and new work, but he presents only the text Ginsberg had prepared. Arranged in sections on politics, drugs, spirituality, censorship, autobiography, the beats generally, contemporary American writers Ginsberg admired, and other writers and artists, it is splendidly browseable. Although his stylistic peculiarities and constant self-reference (done not because he was egoistic but because he was careful to speak of what he personally experienced and felt) can become tiresome, Ginsberg was perspicacious, merciful, and just. Those qualities enlighten this book and make it more immediately approachable than much of his verse. --Ray Olson

These two books reveal the breadth of Burroughs's preoccupations and literary appeal. His last journal contains 168 entries and spans from November 1996 to three days before his death in July 1997. In it, he returns to well-worn themes like the rise of the police state, the pernicious effects of U.S. narcotics laws, and the superiority of cats over humans. Although he was in fairly good health as he was writing, his thoughts also turned frequently to death--no surprise given the recent loss of old friends like Herbert Huncke, Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, and Calico, his favorite cat, who died four days before the journal opens. The book is sprinkled with allusions to literary figures ranging from Shakespeare to Walter de la Mare to Mario Puzzo. The Burroughs we encounter here may have lost some of his gleam, but he has not yet turned to rust. For all serious literary collections. In the latest installment of Mississippi's "Literary Conversation" series, Hibbard (English, Middle Tennessee State Univ.) collects 22 interviews spanning 35 years. They range from a playful piece by Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, first published in the Journal for the Protection of All Beings (1961), to "Grandpa from Hell," an interview that appeared in the L.A. Weekly in 1996. Sources for the interviews include Esquire, Penthouse, and Rolling Stone as well as scholarly journals like Modern Language Studies--a diversity that reflects Burroughs's status as both a serious literary figure and a popular icon. Like most collections of interviews, Hibbard's contains a good deal of repetition, but his chronological arrangement provides a clear window into Burroughs's changing consciousness over half a lifetime. For public and academic libraries.--William Gargan, Brooklyn Coll. Lib., CUNY (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.