Books: Blunted Needle

NOVA EXPRESS by William S. Burroughs. 187 pages. Grove. $5.

Nominally novels, William Burroughs' works are, more precisely, potluck: the cauldron, having flipped its lid, spills nightmare fantasies, sick jokes, narcotic dreams and polemics against pushers and in favor of the apomorphine cure. And, of course, concedes the author, "obscenity is coldly added as the total weapon."

With that sort of prospectus, the St. Louis-born Tangier expatriate was ordained as the high priest of the beats even before his first "novel," Naked Lunch, was off the Grove press. Now, in his second of what...

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